Formats and the Format dimension

You can select a different dimension to be the Format dimension for a data cube. This way, a hierarchical dimension can hold the format strings instead. A cube's Format dimension can be set with modeling tools or in EPM Administration using the Edit Database dashboard.

This feature can be used to format discounts as percentages, for example, or to apply a currency format to unit prices.

Formats can be standard spreadsheet formats such as 0.00% or #,##0.00 or they can be the names of styles. For example, if you have a style named Percent in Application Studio you can specify Percent as the value of a format string.

The value of the format string is stored in a dimension attribute of the Format dimension. The attribute field can be in any attribute table and is named FORMAT_STRING. This name is not case-sensitive. Its value can be changed using the Edit Attributes and Levels dashboard in EPM Administration or with modeling tools.

In Application Studio reports, the cells that display the formats defined in the database must have the tilde (~) format.

Regional settings of the front-end tools have an impact on formats. For example, if you use standard currency formats, the dollar sign is a euro sign in parts of Europe.

This table lists a few examples of returned formatted values for the corresponding combinations of the content of FORMAT_STRING and the value in the data cube:

	#,##0	#,##0.00	0.00%	$#,##0.00	Scientific	Yes/No	On/Off
0	0	0.00	0.00%	$0.00	0.00E+00	No	Off
1	1	1.00	1.00%	$1.00	1.00E+00	Yes	On
42.5	43	42.50	4250.00%	$42.50	4.25E+01	Yes	On
3716529	3,716,529	3,716,529.00	371652900.00%	$3,716,529.00	3.72E+06	Yes	On