Groovy APIs and Edited Cells Since Groovy APIs introduced access to edited cells, there has been significant adoption for using it in form-based business rules. Unsurprisingly, with all calculations written in BSO cubes, FIXes were dynamically updated using Groovy business rules. But what about ASO cubes? ASO Cubes Step Up ASO cubes were traditionally used primarily for reporting purposes. However, with the introduction of Groovy APIs, this trend is shifting. In the past, for simple calculations, we relied on BSO cubes and transferred the calculated data to the reporting cube. Groovy now offer ..read more

Secure Your Server-side EPM Automate with Encrypted Files Server-side EPM Automate has become a powerhouse for streamlining administrative tasks, but just like its client-side counterpart, it faces the critical challenge of secure connection establishment to Cloud EPM applications. Traditionally, this has been achieved through two methods: password strings and encrypted password files. While both serve the purpose, a clear winner emerges when it comes to safeguarding your sensitive credentials – encrypted password files. Keeping the Password Flame Alive: Avoiding the Purge with Regular Activit ..read more

Developers who develop business rules rarely get a function that is purely designed for them. Groovy, for example, allows us to debug a script by printing the outcomes in the job console log, but what about regular business rules? In calculation manager, there is a debug option that has been available for a long time, but I have never been able to use it fully when the functions become complicated or, to be honest, I may not know how to use it. I have been developing a few business rules recently, and @CalcMgrLogMessageTrace function has helped me to understand other functions more effectively ..read more

SEND EMAIL FEATURE both server-side and client-side EPM Automate supports the sendmail command to send custom email notifications to users. This is commonly used to summarize the tasks from scheduled jobs and inform system administrators of the job status PIPELINE IS AN AWESOME ADDITION With the new pipeline feature, which sends a well-formatted email with each task and the necessary information, we can now sit back and let the pipeline handle all of the tasks for us. The Oracle development team has done a great job, and this is a significant time saver. SIZE LIMIT IN EMAILS Although server-si ..read more

Oracle EPM is a global tool that offers its services in a wide range of languages. However, when it comes to error messages, most consultants only consider English. This may have been the case in the pre-EPM Groovy era, when we had to use the @RETURN statement from Essbase to show error messages. In the EPM Groovy era, we have more flexibility in how we show error messages. We can use the Groovy language to internationalize our error messages, so that they can be displayed in the user’s preferred language. This is important for providing a good user experience for users who do not speak Englis ..read more

Smart List drop-downs are used to select predefined values in a data form. They are typically associated with a member. If the number of entries is expected to grow, a hierarchy-driven Smart List can be used. This will automatically update the list of entries as the number of members in the hierarchy increases. However, an alternate approach is to use a business rule to update the entry list. This will eliminate the need to deal with hierarchies. In other words, Smart List drop-downs are used to select values from a predefined list. This list can be updated manually or automatically. If the li ..read more

Month and Year dimensions play a major role in most of the calculations. If it is a single-year app, it is easier to handle the month and year ranges inside our fix statements, but when it comes to multiple-year planning or forecasting, it is required to have multiple IF conditions inside FIX statements. These additional IF checks for the valid months and year can be performed in the Groovy layer, and we should be able to create separate FIXes depending on the number of years that we are planning to execute the calculations. There are two major advantages to this approach: We can see the year ..read more

If you’ve been working with EPBCS recently, you may have all encountered the problem of a frozen screen when users attempted to update a new user variable value using the user preference window. This has been fixed now using a recent patch. But I hope it’s good to have a solution where the system prepopulates the values of each user variable in the future, so users don’t have to use the user preference window to update the user variable values every time a form fails to open. Meanwhile, let’s see how we can update it using a Groovy business rule that will update user variable values. Let’s fol ..read more

A powerful method named getEvaluatedMembers() can be used in a Groovy business rule to fetch members from the system depending on various relationships to the current member. We can retrieve members based on below conditions. Relationship functions (Children, Parents, etc) Substitution Variable User Variables Attributes UDAs Essbase member relationship functions ( @Relative(“Sample”,0) ) – Works now but not sure it will be supported long term ) There aren’t a lot of resources available right now. I therefore decided to make a cheat sheet for quick reference. Since we must repeatedly call the ..read more

Recently, a very typical request from business asking for the YTD data export to a file for an external integration. Although it seemed like a very simple request, the challenges we ran into are described below. YTD is a dynamic calc member It is exclusively calculated in the ASO cube It took forever to export a dynamic member using data management We have decided to try with two options: In the BSO cube, create a new store YTD member, then calculate and export the data. Use the groovy exporter to export the periodic values as well as to export and update data to YTD. Because I hadn’t yet ..read more