Monday, October 31, 2011

Cognos BI and TM1 Integration

Before people start wondering if I am working on TM1, the answer is no. But I am working on using TM1 as a data source and hope to pick up on TM1 in due course.

Here are a couple of points that I think people who are planning on using TM1 as a datasource should consider:

  • TM1 cubes require an explicilty declared Measure dimension for the cubes to get imported into Cognos.


  • The cubes need to have named levels enabled on them for the levels to show up in Cognos.


  • Description attribute needs to be named as Description for the rolevalue of memberDescription to work in Cognos.


  • Cube based aggregation functions do not work on cells in TM1 that have rules defined on them.


Another point that I am still banging my head about is with security. With transformer cubes we have the cloak feature but that doesn't seem to be the case with TM1. Example, if a user has access to Products 1,2,3 belonging to Product Line 1 but does not have access to Products 4,5,6 belonging to the same Product Line, with a transformer cube when the user accesses Product Line 1 he will see the total specific to Products that he has access to but with Transformer he will see the total value of all the products belonging to the product line rather than the products that he has access to which accroding to me is a huge disadvantage. Still trying to work through this. Hope someone out there can shed more light on this.
 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi

I am currently wokring on a TM1 -> cognos implementation as well and have loads of difficulties with attributes - The role value caption and description seem to work the best - have you found anyother rolevalue calcs that work from cognos to TM1?

Zephyr said...

Sorry for the delayed response. Other than Description, MUN none of the other roleValue options work.

But you can enable one and only alias in your FM model which will get reflected directly in your reports without having to use any explicit rolevalue functions.