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Hyperion Financial Reporting | FR Report Design

All Data Sources

Choose the data source best-designed to meet your specific reporting need.

Data sources should be designed to meet the organizational reporting requirements.  There is a great deal of flexibility with Essbase cube design. There is somewhat less with HFM databases and Planning databases and cubes, since both of those data sources have fixed numbers and types of dimensions.

FR Report Design

Minimize the number of dimensions in the grid.

Single-member dimensions should be in the Grid Point of View (POV) or the Report POV.
To set a value in the Grid POV that users cannot change, take the following steps:

1.Click on the Grid Corner to highlight the grid.

2.In the Grid Properties pane, check "Grid Point of View".

3.In the Point of View display in the grid, make the desired selections. For the dimensions to be available to users, leave the value as "User Point of View".

4.Uncheck "Grid Point of View" in the Grid Properties pane.

The dimensions for which you selected members will not be visible to users. You can use Text Functions to display the members in the hidden dimensions.

Callouts

Instead of expansions, use Related Content.

If you want to see detail from a high level in a report, you can use Related Content reports, which are related detail reports containing detail information for the member in the calling report. The related report will pull the point of view for the callout from the calling report. You can set up Related Content links in the Grid Properties pane, or in the Cell Properties pane.

For example: Your primary report is a Cash Flow Statement. In the Uses of Cash section, you include Asset Purchases, which are an alternate rollup of Fixed Assets . You wish to drill down to individual asset purchases.

In your associated detail report,  POV dimensions will include Account. The row dimension selection will be "Current Point of View for Account and Bottom of Hierarchy for Account".  The "Current Point of View for Account" is Asset Purchases, from the calling report.

Minimize the number of row selections using "Descendants of".
If you have more than two dimensions in the rows that are calling Descendants, you can quickly produce an excessively large data set that Financial reporting cannot manage, and your report will not run. You also run the risk of slowing performance at the data source if the data source needs to provide a very large number of intersections.

Instead of calling descendants for multiple dimensions into the grid, put one of the dimensions into the POV. You can put the report into a book, and make the selection in the Report POV in the book. The book will generate a separate report for each selection, pulling in many smaller data sets rather than one very large one.

A report should not require more than 30 or 40 data rows to facilitate maintenance. Similarly, columns should be kept to a manageable number. There is a limit of 256 columns in a report. There is no fixed limit to the number of rows.

Most calculations should be done at the data source.

Basic suppression at the data source reduces the number of data intersections pulled into the report.  Always do Basic Suppression separately from Advanced Suppression.

Estimating Report Size

You can estimate the number of data intersections in a report using the following formula:

(# of members in dimension1) * (# of members in dimension2) * (# of members in dimension3) ... * (number of data rows) * (number of data columns)

Each dimension in the grid acts as multiplier, including dimensions in the rows, columns and pages.

You determine the number of members in a dimension by expanding the dimension until you see the desired member. In a large dimension, you may access hundreds or thousands of members to pull one or a handful of members into the report.

Dimensions in the POV do not act as multipliers. The members are pulled into the report only once.

HFM Data Sources

Be very cautious about using more than one row dimension pulling "Bottom of hierarchy".
Since HFM builds the data store on the HFM server, you can severely degrade HFM performance, or cause "out of memory" failures on the HFM server.

Template Reports

To minimize repetitive design, there is a Row and Column Template functionality, which is discussed at some length in the documentation.  There are limitations to Row and Column Templates, such as limited formatting options and limitations on use.  The particular advantage of such templates is that you can maintain all of the related reports at once.

There is a user-based option that does not give the advantage of maintaining a group of reports at one time, but does have the advantage of limiting repetitive entry and formatting.  That option is creating template reports, in which you create a base report with a group of rows, columns, and calculations you use repeatedly in reports, but which will vary by report to some extent, and which will retain formatting and format heritability.

1.Create one or more template reports.

2. Export the report designs from Workspace and save them to a secure location that is backed up regularly.

3. When you wish to create a new report using the template, import the desired design file, and make the necessary changes.

We recommend the preceding steps, because we have seen situations in which a number of reports had been created from a single report.  There was an issue with the repository, and all of the copied reports were lost.  If you import the design every time, the resulting report is not related to any other report, and is independent of any issues with another report.

Safeguarding Reports

Even though your environment has regular backups, there is not a way to restore a single report that was mistakenly deleted, or had another mishap.  A repository restore is all or nothing.

You can safeguard your most important reports and your reports under development as follows:

1. Export the reports from Workspace.
2. Save the resulting XML files to a safe location. 

Should there be a mishap with an important report or a report under development, you can import your backup copy to Workspace

Oracle Hyperion FR 8104508975607635390

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