About Alternate Names for Presentation Objects

Use alternate names to help track a presentation object's name changes and to prevent queries that include the object's previous name from failing. You can choose to create alternate names for presentation objects automatically or manually.

Alternative names are available for all presentation layer object types: subject areas, presentation tables, presentation columns, presentation hierarchies, and presentation hierarchy levels.

Automatically Create Alternate Names

Enable the Automatically create alternate names on rename user preference to automatically create and add alternate names for all presentation layer object types. After you modify an object's name or when a presentation column's corresponding logical column is updated, Semantic Modeler adds the object's previous name to the Alternate Names field. This is to prevent breaking references that any existing requests have to the old names, including requests from workbooks, analyses, dashboards, reports, or other logical clients. By default, the Automatically create alternate names on rename user preference is disabled.

See Enable Automatic Creation of Alternate Names on Presentation Objects.

Manually Create Alternate Names

By default Semantic Modeler doesn't create alternate names when you change a presentation object's name. You can choose to manually create alternate names for objects to prevent breaking references that any existing requests have to the old names, including requests from workbooks, analyses, dashboards, reports, or other logical clients. You can manually create alternate names when the Automatically create alternate names on rename user preference is enabled or disabled.

For example, suppose you have a subject area called Sample Sales Reduced that contains a presentation table called Facts Other. If you rename the table's presentation column # of Customers to Number of Customers, any requests that use # of Customers fail. However, if you add a # of Customers alternate name to the Number of Customers column object, then queries containing both # of Customers and Number of Customers succeed and return the same results.

Because presentation layer objects are often deleted and then re-created during the semantic model development process, it's best to wait until your logical business model is relatively stable before renaming and manually creating alternate names for presentation objects.

Keep the following in mind when you work with alternate names:

• Alternate names for presentation objects aren't displayed in the subject areas that users access to create visualizations and analyses. Also, alternate names aren't displayed in other query clients used to create queries. End users and users who write queries only use the assigned names of subject areas, hierarchies, levels, tables, and columns.

• Alternate names work differently than SQL aliases or the alias feature in the physical layer. Alternate names provides synonyms for object names, much like synonyms in SQL.

• You can't rename a presentation object to a name that's already in use as an alias for an object of the same type.

• You can use alternate names in logical queries.