Those who have worked with Oracle EPM for several years know there is usually more than one way to do things (although we consultants sometimes think that "our" way of doing something is the correct way!). With Oracle FCC and Planning there are at least five different ways of editing metadata (entities, accounts, etc.). These options have varying levels of edit checks available, at least for FCC. This post will talk about the five with a particular focus on edit checks. There is no one "right" way here, but there are "better" and "not as good" options.
Option 1 - "simplified" or "new" metadata editor
This option is built into the software and is accessed by selecting Navigator icon > Overview (from Application menu section) > Dimensions > select dimension. This option presents the metadata in a grid format where parents can be expanded/collapsed, columns moved around, valid choices presented as dropdowns, etc. Attributes can be copied and pasted across multiple members which is helpful.
There are pros and cons related to edit checks. If you try entering an alias with more than 80 characters, you are allowed to do so but you can't save [thanks to Jake Turrell for the info]. Kinda good (can't save) but kinda bad (allowed to type the extra characters). But where this editor shines with FCC are the visual attribute edits. Here, Average is not a valid exchange rate type for FCC and the software is adding the red border to indicate that. This change was made in the old editor (option 2) and in the new editor, Average isn't even a choice. But it still shows the field as something that needs to be corrected.
Disclosure: this is my default choice out of the options presented but will use another option below when needed, so keep reading.
Option 2 - "classic" or "old" metadata editor
The classic/old Essbase metadata editor is accessed by selecting Navigator icon > Dimensions (from Create and Manage menu section) > select dimension. This option was the original metadata editor in FCC and has been available for several years after Oracle said they were going to remove it (when the "new" one came out). I think there are larger priorities and if people are used to using this editor with earlier versions or with Essbase or with Planning then why not.
The metadata is presented as a hierarchy but each member must be edited individually: no copying/pasting to multiple cells like in option 1.
However, as far as editing goes, it does lack some features. It will correctly not allow an alias to be entered that's greater than 80 characters [again, thanks to Jake]. But it will allow for invalid attribute choices to be selected. They may be valid for Essbase and/or Planning, but not everything is valid for FCC. Here, the Average option is not valid for FCC but can be selected and saved and there is no notification that this will be a problem.
Option 3 - Oracle Smart View
Smart View can also be used to edit metadata directly in Excel. This option does have some ease of use: built in extract/submit buttons, cut/copy/paste, Excel features like AutoFilter and use of functions to build metadata components, etc. But it lacks the edit checks as shown above.
I do use this one frequently when doing initial metadata building. It's commonplace to begin a project where someone gives me an Excel file with the chart of accounts, legal entity hierarchy, etc. Unfortunately, for some reason today I can't get it to open today to take the screenshot.
Option 4 - Export to text file, make changes, upload
This option is probably the simplest in theory, but the hardest to make work successfully. Export the metadata to a text or CSV file, manually make the changes, and load back in. With this option there are no edit checks and lots of room to create errors (like leave out a comma [delimiter]) but technically it does work.
Option 5 - Oracle Enterprise Data Management
Why worry about edit checks if you can eliminate the errors altogether? Enterprise Data Management is a part of the Oracle Cloud EPM suite that adds governance, rules, workflow, and other features around metadata management. Each target application can have the edit checks around what's valid and not valid set up. This is usually an additional cost (unless you already have Enterprise licensing for Oracle Cloud EPM and can work with less than 5,000 members) and does involve a project to implement but there are a lot of benefits that none of the other options can match.
These are five of the common ways to work with FCC metadata. All of these are valid approaches although the manual editing with the text file is probably the least likely to be used. My guess is that many FCC administrators use options 1 and 3 OR they use option 5 (in which case they probably don't need the other options).
