About Aliases

You can assign alternate names, or aliases, to system dimensions and user-defined dimension members. The application allows up to 30 aliases per dimension member, including the default alias. Aliases can have the same name within an alias table and across alias tables.

Aliases can also have:

• The same name as a member

• The same alias on members that are parent and child

• The same name for members from different dimensions or from the same dimension

Note:

• You can't have the same alias for two members that are siblings because there would be no way to uniquely identify the member. This rule is enforced by the application for base members, but not for shared members.

  This rule isn't enforced for shared members because you can't directly set aliases for shared members; shared member aliases are inherited from the alias of their base member. It's possible to create an alternative hierarchy where you can have two shared members that have the same alias and are siblings. However, this situation is discouraged if you want to reference these members by their aliases from an adhoc grid because, when you type the alias into the grid and submit it to the application, the application can't uniquely resolve this member and it will return an error. If you're using the alias for display purposes only then there will be no issue, but this design is discouraged because, visually, there is no way to differentiate between these two members.

• Although aliases can have the same name as a member, be careful not to set the alias of member1 to be the same name as member2. This can lead to unintended results and will cause confusion on the form grids.

• Member names must be unique so that they can be used in rules and form designs.