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Author's profile photo Ian McAlpine

Expand to Level – Underexposed but helpful, new features in BI4.1

Today, in our continuing series of new functionality in Analysis edition for OLAP that may not share the spotlight with others, I would like to highlight the ability to quickly expand or collapse an entire hierarchy to a specific level in BI4.1.

Problem

You want to expand every member in a hierarchy down to a particular level, but you don’t want to have to laboriously click the ‘+’ icon beside every member to drill down each level.

Current (BI4.0)

In Analysis OLAP 4.0, you can either choose the laborious path and click all the ‘+’ icons, or you can use the “Show levels” feature. First you collapse your hierarchy to the root level, then use the “Show levels” feature to unselect all levels between the root level and the level you want to expand down to. You then click on the ‘+’ icon beside the root member and this will display all members at the desired level. You can now return to the “Show levels” feature and select all the previously unselected levels. This will add all the parent members between the root and the desired level. Great… but that is not an intuitive solution.

New

In BI4.1, we have added a new context menu option, “Expand to level”. Simply right-click on the hierarchy, choose “Expand to level” and in the sub-menu choose the desired level. The entire hierarchy will now expand to show all members down to the desired level… as shown in the image below. Easy!

/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/expand_215708.png

Don’t forget, this is also a great way to quickly collapse a hierachy. In just two clicks you can collapse an expanded hierarchy up to any level.

Look out for other posts showcasing what’s new in Analysis edition for OLAP over the coming days.

Regards,

Ian

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      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hello Ian, very nice post.

      Is it possible to create an hierarchy in BO OLAP using as source a calculation view or attribute view in Hana ?

      I created a calculation view with hierarchy but it does not appear in OLAP. I'm using the latest version of BO 4.1 SP4

      thks

      Author's profile photo Ian McAlpine
      Ian McAlpine
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Victor

      You would create the hierarchy using HANA Studio, not AOLAP.

      In general AOLAP uses the hierarchies defined on the data source. The exception to this is our "Custom Grouping" feature which does all you to use AOLAP to create a custom hierarchy... but currently this feature is only available for MS Analysis Services and Oracle Essbase data sources.

      Regards

      Ian

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. We created both calculation/analytic views with hierarchies in Hana Studio. We can see these hierarchies as tree view in Excel using MDX connector, it works very fine. But the same hierarchies does not work in AOLAP. Is there any different thing we need to do for AOLAP ?

      Author's profile photo Ian McAlpine
      Ian McAlpine
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Victor

      If the data is not sensitive can you post a screenshot of what you are seeing in Excel and what you are seeing in AOLAP. I would have expected this to work in AOLAP.

      Thanks

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Sorry, it was my mistake. It works ! I had such a big calc view, I didn't realize that the hierarchy appears only after the field defined as leaf node in the hierarchy.

      Thanks,

      /wp-content/uploads/2014/11/screen_shot_582144.jpg

      Author's profile photo Ian McAlpine
      Ian McAlpine
      Blog Post Author

      That's good news Victor. I was getting concerned. Thanks for confirming all is good.

      Regards

      Ian

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hello Ian,

      Is it possible to expand the hierarchy of axis displayed in row or columns (hierarchical display of characteristics in rows or columns) as you do with simple BW hierarchies ?

      I didn't find the functionality.

      In case it is not possible, is it a future enhancement planned by SAP ?

      Thanks for your help.

      Best regards,

      Bertrand