Here’s a papercut I’d like to present in the context of my thoughts on papercuts in the Essbase ecosystem. I’ve recently been doing a bit more work with FDM. After an FDM data load you need to calc data (related to what you just loaded, although I suppose you could just calc the whole thing if you wanted to) related to the intersections you just loaded. In other words, if you are loading data for a certain time period or location or whatever, you’ll want to roll that data up. Nothing special there. So you have a normal calc script except it has been parameterized for FDM – it searches for tokens in the script, such as in FIX statements, then replaces a template variable with the real variable. So it’s like [T.Location] gets replaced with the actual location. But guess what, when you go to validate the calc script now (and you do always validate your calc scripts, right?), it doesn’t validate.

Hmm.

So, I’m not an FDM expert. Maybe there’s an option to work around this that I don’t know about. Maybe you can stuff these tokenized names into a dummy alias table so that you can at least validate. But it seems like the “right” way to handle this would be to find a solution where you can still validate the calc. I guess one straightforward way to do this might be an option to ignore values with brackets around them that are enclosed in quotes. But it feels wrong that using FDM and tokenizing your calc script leads you down this path. If you have worked with this and have a solution that I don’t know because I’m not an FDM expert and you are, please let me know. But right now it’s just one of those quirky little less than ideal issues that I consider an Essbase Papercut.