1. Administrator's Guide
  2. Working with Planning Application Administration
  3. Using Smart Lists, UDAs, and Member Formulas
  4. Working with UDAs

Working with UDAs

You can use user-defined attributes (UDAs), descriptive words or phrases, within calc scripts, member formulas, and reports. UDAs return lists of members associated with the UDA. For example:

  • You can use the HSP_UDF UDA to prevent a formula from being overwritten when the application is refreshed. You must log on to each database associated with the Planning application and create the member formula with a UDA. The syntax for this UDA is: (UDAs: HSP_UDF).

  • If you use the @XREF function to look up a data value in another database to calculate a value from the current database, you can add the HSP_NOLINK UDA to members to prevent the @XREF function from being created on all plan types that are not the source plan type selected for that member.

  • For a Product dimension with several product members, you can create a UDA called New Products and assign this UDA to the new products in the Product dimension hierarchy. Then you can base certain calculations on the designation New Products.

  • For the budget review process, rather than creating a data validation rule for each owner in a product line (some product lines can have hundreds of owners), you can create a UDA containing the user names that apply to members using the planning unit hierarchy. Then in the data validation rule, you can enter a lookup function which will return the user names stored in the UDA for the current member. For example, create a UDA for each user in the promotional path and assign a prefix to the UDA name (for example, ProdMgr:Kim).

For more information on creating and using UDAs, see Considerations for Working with Essbase and the Oracle Essbase Database Administrator's Guide.

UDAs are specific to dimensions. For example, creating a UDA for an Account member makes it available for non-shared Account members. Deleting it removes it for all Account members. To make UDAs available for multiple dimensions, create the same UDA for multiple dimensions. For example, create a UDA named New for Account and Entity dimensions to make the UDA named New available for Account and Entity members.

To select UDAs for members:

  1. Select Administration, then Manage, then Dimensions.
  2. Select the dimension for whose members to associate the UDA.
  3. From the dimension hierarchy, select a member and click Edit.
  4. Select UDA.
  5. Optional: To create a UDA, click Create.
  6. Select UDAs for the member by moving them to Selected UDA and clicking Save:

    • Add icon move selected UDAs

    • Remove icon remove selected UDAs

    • Remove All icon remove all UDAs