Action button : Get selected DBRW value for TI process

Hi Stuart, This is meant for Perspectives, PAX or PAfE whatever it is called now.

If we add an Action Button in Perspectives or the Excel front end of your choice, and choose Go to another workbook, then we get additional Advanced Options. When we click on that, under Source Type we can choose Selected DBRW.

Therefore, if I clicked on a cell in a Grid that was the intersection of lets say the Overheads Cost Centre consolidation and the Forecast version, then both of these can be passed as parameters to the second Workbook, which, assuming that Cost Centre and Version are in the Title Area, then these would be automatically selected as Overheads and Forecast, or alternatively they could just be passed into a Named Range on that other workbook for some other purpose.

We quite often present a grid showing the workflow stage of various Cost Centres and then the user can select one of these just by clicking that sell and then click the Action Button to launch another workbook that will then allow them to enter eg a detailed forecast. We often do this by combining an Active Form/Dynamic Report to allow expansion of a series of Cost Centres in a Directorate which the user selects with a SUBNM above. We only show the + of the Active Form by making the Column one character wide with no indentation., We then show the Description of the Cost Centre alongside this using a DBRW to the }ElementAttributes cube. This then gives a DBRW where the user can select the Cost Centre just by clicking in that cell.

If we instead add an Action Button and this time choose Run a Turbo Integrator Process, then you have the option to get Process info from the worksheet. That means that you can get both the Process Name and Parameter Values from the workbook. However, there is no option to get parameter values from the selected DBRW as there is with the Go to another workbook option.

A potential use for this would be for the Action Button to run a TI process for the Cost Centre in the selected DBRW to reset its workflow.

If we had this facility it would allow us to use the same workflow display sheet to allow the user to both launch a detailed forecast entry sheet and to reset workflow just by clicking on the cost centre and clicking the appropriate action button.

Other people will no doubt find other uses for this.

At present to do this sort of thing users would have to do a two step process. First click a button to get the details of the Selected DBRW into a worksheet, typically named ranges in the current worksheet, and then click another button to pass those into a TI process. That is not a very elegant user interface.

There is currently an option on the Action Button for 'Run a process, then go to a Worksheet'. However, that is in the wrong order for this purpose.

One possible way to do this would be if there was an option to 'Go to a Worksheet and then run a process', Then the Go to a Worksheet could be used to get details from the selected DBRW into a worksheet, eg the current worksheet, and these could then be passed as parameters into the TI process using the existing Get process info from worksheet approach. Then a user could achieve what we want with one click of an Action button.

Hopefully, that makes it clearer.

I would also ideally like this facility in PAW. I know that release 62 allows you to synchronise an Action Button's TI Parmeters with selectors on a book, however, I have not yet tried it to see if it can recognise the selected cell in a grid to get parameters from that.

Regards

Paul Simon

What Planning Analytics client is this request specific to? Is this really a Planning Analytics for Excel request, or a Planning Analytics Workspace list?

In PAfE you can any cell in Excel to read a value to use as a TI parameter. This has already been a function of TM1 Perspectives and the PAfE action button config.

I sort of suspect this might be a Planning Analytics Workspace specific request. For action buttons in Workspace we now have a sync option to allow selections from the book to be synced to parameters of a TI process. This can be used to remove the prompt when running the TI process from a Workspace action button. This feature made it into the 2.0.62 release.

I'm going to close this idea based on my above comments. But if I'm not understanding the enhancement request correctly, please let me know. I would be happy to setup a Webex to review and capture any missing details. stuart.king@ca.ibm.com if you want to reach out directly.

Hello Paul, at the moment I cannot recreate my chain of thoughts of dec 201. But I think I meant the following. The purpose is to select a DBRW formula. When a TI process is run from a button and the TI process contains parameters, the parameter values at run-time could be extracted from the DBRW. For example, we have a TI process with parameters for the dimensions company-year-month-scenario-version, well a DBRW formula pointing to a cell in a cube with these dimensions (and more dims) could be extracted and yield the parameter values. No need to enter parameter values again if they can be "selected" by looking at the selected DBRW. Does this make sense ?

It would be helpful to have more information on the use case.

it's a way to do it. VBA. really need more info.

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