Working with User-Defined Attributes (UDAs)

You can use user-defined attributes (UDAs) within member formulas, reports and forms. UDAs return lists of members associated with the attribute. For example:

• For a Product dimension with several product members, you can create a UDA called New Products and assign this UDA to the new products in the Product dimension hierarchy. Then you can base certain calculations on the New Products designation.

• If you use the @XREF function to look up a data value in another database to calculate a value from the current database, you can add the HSP_NOLINK UDA to members to prevent the @XREF function from being created on all application types that are not the source type selected for that member.

• You can use the HSP_NOMOF_<PlantypeName> UDA to make sure that dynamic members (or "on the fly members") are not created in the specified plan type, <PlantypeName>, even if the parent member is valid for this plan type. This prevents dynamic children from affecting aggregation on select cubes.

UDAs are specific to dimensions. For example, creating a UDA for an Account member makes it available for non-shared Account members. Deleting it removes it for all Account members. To make UDAs available for multiple dimensions, create the same UDA for multiple dimensions. For example, create a UDA named New for the Account and Entity dimensions to make it available for Account and Entity members.

To select UDAs for members:

1. Click the Navigator icon .
2. Under Create and Manage, click Dimensions.
3. Select the dimension for whose members to associate the UDA.
4. From the dimension hierarchy, select a member and click Edit.
5. Select UDA.
6. Optional: To create a UDA, click Create.
7. Select UDAs for the member by moving them to Selected UDA and clicking Save:

   • Add moves the selected UDAs to the Selected USA panel.

   • Remove removes selected UDAs.

   • Remove All removes all UDAs.