1. Administering Data Management for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud
  2. Using Data Management
  3. Administration Tasks
  4. Registering Target Applications
  5. Loading Data to a Free Form Application

Loading Data to a Free Form Application

The Free Form application type is a business process that recreates a native Oracle Essbase application within the Planning environment to support required analysis. Free Form allows any dimensions to be associated with the cube. The Planning-specific Currency, Entity, Scenario, and Version dimensions, along with their member hierarchies are not required with Free Form business processes. You use Free Form to do your own modeling and build your own cubes while preserving the ability to leverage platform functionality. Service Administrators build a Free Form application using an Essbase outline (OTL) file, or by manually defining the dimensionality.. For more information, see Creating a Free Form Business Process in the Getting Started with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for Administrators.

Free Form applications are meant for customers who want to create an Essbase application for anything or to migrate an on-premise application to the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud because the Free Form application in Planning does not have any dimension requirements.

You can load these Free Form applications in Data Management and Data Integration, but there are a number of considerations:

  1. The Free Form application requires a minimum of three dimensions: Account, Period, and Scenario. The application definition in Data Management and Data Integration must have three dimensions with the dimension type of Account, Period, and Scenario.

  2. You must set up a period mapping so that the system knows where to load the data. For example, you could set up period mapping with a period of Jan-20 which is the period member created in a Free Form application. When you set up a period mapping in Data Management and Data Integration, you enter a period created in the Free Form application and a year entry so that it passes the user interface validations for the period mapping. This is he case where the you don't have to define a year dimension in your Free Form application, only a period.

  3. You must specify a Scenario dimension, but in Planning, it can be anything. The only requirement is that the dimension is classified as scenario on our side. You then need to set up category mapping so that the process succeeds.

  • Assign a dimension classification of Account for one of the dimensions.

  • If you want to use the drill through functionality, then a "Scenario" dimension is required. Assign a dimension classification of Scenario for one of the dimensions. Note when a dimension is classified as Scenario, the Category mapping is used to assign a target value, so data can be loaded to only one value. Select a dimension that meets this requirement and define a Category mapping.

  • If you want to use Check feature, then an "Entity" dimension is required. Assign a dimension classification of Entity for one of the dimensions.

Applications of type ASO are not auto registered when they are created. Use the Data Management Target Application page and select Application type of Essbase to manually register the application.