1. Working with Oracle Smart View for Office
  2. Free-Form Mode
  3. Duplicate Aliases in Free-Form Mode

Duplicate Aliases in Free-Form Mode

Review the guidelines and examples in this topic when working with duplicate aliases in free-form mode.

Data source types: Planning

Planning supports duplicate aliases for members from different dimensions and for members within dimensions.

To use duplicate aliases, you must have, at a minimum, Oracle Smart View for Office 11.1.2.5.600, and you must be connected to Planning version 16.06 or later.

The guidelines are:

  • Duplicate aliases are supported across dimensions and within dimensions.

  • Aliases can have the same name as a member.

  • Member names are still required to be unique so that they can be used in rules and form design to avoid name collisions.

When typing a duplicate alias name in free-form mode, and then refreshing, a message appears asking you to resolve the duplicate. You can do this either by using the Member Selector to select the correct alias name or by hand-typing the qualified name in this format:

[parent_member_name].[alias]

or

[parent_alias].[alias]

Only duplicate alias names are supported, not duplicate member names; therefore, using the parent member name as a qualifier should be sufficient in many cases.

However, if [parent_alias] is also a duplicate, then the qualified name should be extended up to the first unique ancestor, in this format:

[grand_parent_member_name].[parent_alias].[alias]

or

[grand_parent_alias].[parent_alias].[alias]

For example, suppose a database has the following Market and Geography dimension hierarchies, with duplicate alias names at the Region, State, and City level. In this scenario, East, New York (state), and New York (city) are duplicate alias names, as follows:

Market                  Geography
    East                    East
       New York                New York
          New York                New York

You want to enter the city, New York, from the Market dimension into a free-form grid. To do this, you could select the city, New York, from the Market dimension in the Member Selector. Or, you could type the qualified name as follows:

[Market].[East].[New York].[New York]