Slices
Many reports contain a hierarchy on the row axis and a hierarchy on the column axis. The elements of the hierarchies form the column and row headings of the report. Further hierarchies are used as filter hierarchies. The elements that users select from the column, row, and filter hierarchies affect the values that they see. For example, they might choose to see the number of sales of all products in Europe in 2013, or the revenue generated through a particular sales channel by a single product in 2014.
You can put multiple elements from multiple hierarchies on an axis. For example, you might display a product hierarchy and period hierarchy on the column axis. In this case the report displays a value for every combination of product and period. You can also put multiple groups of elements from a single hierarchy on an axis. For example display the quarters of the previous, current, and future years in order to compare actual, budget, and forecast values. Each such group of elements is a segment.
There are two ways in which to design such a report layout. The first is to use lists in hyperblocks and other report objects. The second is to define slices in which the row, column, and filter dimensions are defined in a single object. A particular benefit of using slices is that, if suppression of zero or empty values is required, calculation of the report values is quicker and more efficient than with lists. If you use lists, calculation of the lists, calculation of the values, and zero suppression requires separate calls to the database.
When you create a slice, the data that it references is read from the database and held in memory. Typically, you use a SLICEGET formula to read the data and display it.
See SLICEGET.
The New Slice dialog enables you to create slices.
See Creating a standard slice.
If you already have a suitable XML variable, you can select in the New Slice dialog and select the variable.
To create an XML variable for use as a slice requires the use of several slice functions.