Base a Logical Column's Sort Order on a Different Column

Change the sort order of a logical column when you don't want to order a column's values alphabetically (lexical order).

In a lexical order sort, columns are ordered by their alphabetic spelling and not divided into a separate group. For example, if you sorted on month (using a column such as MONTH_NAME), the results return February, January, March in their lexicographical sort order.

Suppose you want to sort months in chronological order, so January, February, and March. Your table needs to have a month key such as MONTH_KEY with values of 1 (January), 2 (February), 3 (March) to achieve the chronological sort order. You set the Sort order column field for the MONTH_NAME column to the MONTH_KEY and then a request to order by MONTH_NAME would return January, February, and March.

The sort column is automatically defined for Essbase data sources when business models are created by dragging and dropping cubes from the Physical layer.

1. On your home page, click Navigator and then click Semantic Models.
2. In the Semantic Models page, click a semantic model to open it.
3. Click Logical Layer .
4. In the Logical Layer pane, browse for and double-click the table with the logical column you want to change the sort order for.
5. In the logical table, click the Columns tab.
6. In the column table, click the column to highlight it, and then click Detail view to view its properties.
7. In the logical column's General properties, click Sort By and select the column that you want to sort by.
8. Click Save.