Friday, March 4, 2022

Reporting - Managing the POV - Grid/Global and Hide/Not Hide

Just spent five minutes figuring out how to manage the point of view in a Reporting (not Financial Reporting) report. One would think this would be simple. For the most part, it is, but not always.

When a grid is open, the point of view displays along the top. The word Default (as shown below for the Period dimension) means to prompt the user for the member selection at run-time. Choosing something else will lock the dimension to that member. Clicking the vertical ellipse icon on the right side of the dimension opens a menu. Reset to Default is straightforward - the member gets cleared and the below choices get reset. Hide Dimension suppresses or doesn't show the dimension and the selected member. In case you're wondering, if the dimension is set to Default AND the dimension is hidden, the first member in the dimension (likely the dimension name) gets used.



The last selection is whether the dimension is Global or not. If Global, then the dimension and the selected member will apply to all grids in the report. If Global is not selected, then the dimension setting is specific to that grid. If not global and not hid, then the dimension and the current selection will show at the top of the grid within the report when the report is run and users can change the member.

So far so good. The problem comes when you want to change things. The order of the selections should not matter - set the member, hide/unhide, or global/not global. But that is not the case. Here, the member is selected and the dimension is global, but the option to hide or not hide is greyed out. If you turn off Global, then Hide is still greyed out.



The solution for this is to reset to default and start over. After the reset, verify Global is selected, set the member, and then select Hide.


In the end, the initial build is easy enough, but if a change is needed, it isn't really a change: it's a start over.