Best Practices
There are various types of alternate viewpoints. The type of alternate viewpoint you use, and the data chain objects you use to build the alternate viewpoint, depend upon your objective. The following questions determine which type of alternate viewpoint you need to define and which data chain objects you need to create:
- Will the alternate viewpoint create relationships between node types that are not used in the bound viewpoint? In other words, will the alternate viewpoint use a category of nodes that is not in the bound viewpoint?
- Will the alternate viewpoint use parent-child relationships that differ from the relationships in the bound viewpoint?
- Is the alternate viewpoint's purpose to group the bound viewpoint's bottom-level nodes under new top nodes while preserving the bound viewpoint's parent-child relationships?
If so, will you have users work on the alternate viewpoint in the same viewpoint as the bound viewpoint or in a new viewpoint?
The following table summarizes the types of alternate viewpoints you can create.
Table 19-1 Types of Alternate Viewpoints
| Type | Example | More Information |
|---|---|---|
| Group nodes under new top nodes while preserving the bound viewpoint's parent-child relationships. | Cost centers rolled up by geography and by function. | Alternate Viewpoints Using Different Top Nodes |
| Define parent-child relationships that differ from those defined in the bound viewpoint.
This type of hierarchy is often used for what-if or future planning scenarios. |
Analyze the impact of a reorganization of business units. | Alternate Viewpoints Using Different Parent-Child Relationships |
| Create relationships using node types that are not in the bound viewpoint's data chain. | A hierarchy listing products organized by supplier, starting with a bound viewpoint of products. | Alternate Viewpoints Using Different Node Types |
| Define relationships between nodes in different applications that share information with each other. | A mapping hierarchy maps source nodes from one application to target nodes in another application. The mapping hierarchy segregates the dimension mapping relationships from the hierarchy relationships in the dimension. | Creating Mapping Viewpoints |
If you need to create new node types, node sets, or hierarchy sets, see:
Exporting an Alternate Viewpoint's Data
To export an alternate viewpoint's data to an external application, bind the dimension to the alternate viewpoint, see Binding a Viewpoint to a Dimension in Planning and FreeForm Applications.
Note:
You can't change the bound viewpoint for a Universal application's dimension. You can however download the alternate viewpoint's data and then load the data into the external application, see Downloading a Viewpoint.