Monday, August 25, 2014

So I and some other folks were recently asked by Oracle about what would we would do to enhance HFM. Not in the sense of new features, but making the existing features work better; getting rid of nuisances. I sent in several things that have always bothered me. For example, the load data screen should be securable from the end users. If we're using FDM or ODI to load the data, then we don't want end users to have access to that screen; with it, they can overwrite the data coming through FDM and mess up the audit trails, drill back, and provide unbalanced or just plain weird data. Another request was for cell text input in data grids when the grids are not allowed for user input. We don't want users changing data via grids but cell text is okay.

Some suggestions were on the performance side too. In Calculation Manager, when the script is rendered for loading to HFM, each function still specifies the HS object, like HS.Exp, HS.Entity.Member, etc. The improvement here would be to use With HS/End With like we do in Classic script. Note you can do this notation in script objects in the newer versions of Calculation Manager but the code from the other objects doesn't take advantage of this common technique.

I'm glad they're always working to improve HFM and make it better with each release. What would you suggest?