Example. Different drivers for different attributes

In this example, the Product Manager attribute for a product is driven by time and region. The Market Entry Date attribute is driven only by region.

To control such different combinations of driver dimension, each element in an attribute dimension has a boolean applicability attribute. The value, True or False, of an applicability attribute determines whether a particular attribute is affected by a particular driver dimension.

If there is no driver dimension for an attribute, you specify a non-applicability element. This is the element that is used if the driver is not applicable. For example, a report might show the product manager and market entry date for a list of products. If you select a different element from the Time dimension, the values for market entry date that are shown in the report are those that are stored against the specified non-applicability element of the Time dimension. That might be, for example, the All Years element.

In this example, the dynamic attribute cube has these dimension:

  • The Product dimension.
  • The driver dimensions, Region and Time.
    • For Product Manager, Region and Time are used as drivers.
    • For Market Entry Date, only Region is used as a driver.
  • The attribute dimension, ATD_PRODUCT, with these attributes:
    • period_applicable (logical)
    • region_applicable (logical)
    • Format_Type (string)

The dimension has these elements and attributes:

Element period_applicable region_applicable Format_Type
Product Manager TRUE TRUE
Market_Entry_Date FALSE TRUE

These are the XML properties of the fact cube:


<Alea:DynamicAttributes>
<Alea:Dimension Name="PRODUCT"> 
<Alea:AttributeCube Name="ATC_PRODUCT"/>
</Alea:Dimension>
</Alea:DynamicAttributes>

These are the XML properties of the dynamic attribute cube: 


<Alea:DynamicAttributeConfiguration>
<Alea:Dimension Name="PRODUCT"/>
<Alea:AttributeDimension Name="ATD_Product"/>
<Alea:DriverDimensions> 
<Alea:DriverDimension Name="REGION">
<Alea:ApplicabilityAttribute Name="region_applicable"/> 
<Alea:NonApplicableElement Name="All Regions”/>
</Alea:DriverDimension>
<Alea:DriverDimension Name="PERIOD">  
<Alea:ApplicabilityAttribute Name="period_applicable"/>
<Alea:NonApplicableElement Name="All Years”/> 
</Alea:DriverDimension>
</Alea:DriverDimensions>
</Alea:DynamicAttributeConfiguration>