Creating mappings

You create mappings to load structures to the hierarchies of an application model and to populate cubes with fact data. In both cases, mappings are from the staging database to your application model. Tables and views can be used as sources.

Mappings that you create are displayed in the Mappings Overview dashboard. Dashboards > OLAP > Mappings Overview. There, you import, export, run, and delete mappings.

For hierarchy mappings, the fields for each mapping depend on how the source data is structured. The source data can be held in one of these types of structure:

Parent-child
Level-based
Flat

Those structures do not apply to fact data mappings, all of which are made through a data connection to a specified fact table.

The same data can be stored in different ways, so you must have knowledge of your source data. For example, a list of geographical areas could be stored in a table with a hierarchical, parent-child structure, or in a table with a level-based structure.

This table shows a level-based structure of areas. The three levels are Continent, Region , and Country.


Continent	Region	Country
Europe	Central	Slovakia
Europe	Central	Czech Republic
Europe	Scandinavia	Finland
Europe	Scandinavia	Sweden
United States	Northeast	Massachusetts
United States	Northeast	New York
United States	Midwest	Michigan
United States	Midwest	Minnesota

This table shows the same data in a parent-child structure


Parent	Child 1	Child 2
Europe
	Central Europe
		Slovakia
		Czech Republic
	Scandinavia
		Finland
		Sweden
United States
	Northeast
		Massachusetts
		New York
	Midwest
		Michigan
		Minnesota

An example of data with a flat structure is a list of currencies and their codes.