When Is A Member Not A Member?

When is a member not a member? Sometimes in the Essbase Java API, that's when. Depending on how you obtained your IEssMember object instance, it may only partially describe the member. What I mean by that is that is that some properties are not available, and are thus either blank/null or throw an Exception when you try to access them. This is why it can be frustrating to work with the Essbase API. For what it is worth, this problem is not limited to the Essbase Java API but is also a present in the C and VB APIs as well. In this blog, I will focus on the Java API but for those of you using the C and VB APIs, see if you can spot the corresponding API calls in those languages.

To start, let's look at 3 common ways to get an IEssMember object in the Essbase Java API:

• IEssCube.getMember()
• IEssMemberSelection.executeQuery()
• IEssCubeOutline.findMember()

Each of these methods have their advantages and their disadvantages. The IEssCube.getMember() method is fast but doesn't return all properties. IEssMemberSelection.queryMembers() allows you to find multiple members based on relationships or wildcard searches but, again, doesn't return all of the properties; it also will cause hanging Essbase connections if you don't properly close the IEssMemberSelection object. IEssCubeOutline.findMember() gives you basically all of the information but requires that you open the outline. Opening the outline can be terribly slow if you have a large outline or, in our experience, if the outline is built using EIS or Essbase Studio. The fact that there are multiple ways to get the member information can certainly be frustrating.

One example of frustration occurred this spring when we decided to add attribute information to the MemberTips we optionally display in a Dodeca member selector. We uncommented our server code that calls the IEssMember.getAssociatedAttributes() method and were not surprised that this method threw an Exception. We have gone to great lengths to make Dodeca performant and, for the most part, don't open the outline. As a test, however, we decided to open the outline only when the query was returning this information. As soon as we tested this on one of our larger customer outlines with 385,000 members in the Entities dimension, we knew this approach would be much too slow to put into production. Upon further testing, we found that we could get 2 of 4 attribute-related properties without opening the outline and that is what we have now implemented.

Dodeca MemberTips

This summer, I have my lucky intern working on a research project with Essbase member information with the Java API. The first thing I had him do was to write some Java code that used reflection to attempt to find which properties were available to each method of obtaining an IEssMember object. Here is a summary of that work using 11.1.1.3 run against Sample Basic using 100-10 as the target member. An 'x' in the cell indicates that the property value appears to have been returned properly; a blank indicates either an error occurred or, perhaps, that the method didn't work due to member 100-10 not being a dimension root member, etc.

MethodName	Cube	Member Selection	Outline
getAggregationLevelUsage	x	x	x
getAssociatedAttributes			x
getAttributeAssocLevel	x	x	x
getAttributeMemberDataType	x	x	x
getAttributeValue	x	x	x
getChildCount		x	x
getChildMembers			x
getConsolidationType	x	x	x
getCountChildMembers	x	x	x
getCountOfDupMemberNameInDim*
getCurrencyCategoryOrName		x	x
getCurrencyConversionType		x	x
getDescription	x	x	x
getDimensionCategory		x	x
getDimensionName	x	x	x
getDimensionNumber	x	x	x
getDimensionSolveOrder	x	x	x
getDimensionStorageCategory		x	x
getDimensionStorageType		x	x
getFirstChildMemberName	x	x	x
getFormatString	x	x
getFormula	x	x	x
getGenerationNumber	x	x	x
getHierarchyType*		x	x
getLastFormula	x	x	x
getLevelNumber	x	x	x
getLinkedAttributeAttachLevel	x	x	x
getMemberComment			x
getMemberId	x	x	x
getMemberNumber	x	x	x
getMemberType*
getName	x	x	x
getNextSiblingMemberName	x	x	x
getOriginalMemberName	x	x	x
getParentMemberName	x	x	x
getPreviousSiblingMemberName	x	x	x
getPropertyDataTypes	x	x	x
getPropertyModes	x	x	x
getPropertyNames	x	x	x
getRelatedMemberNames			x
getRoot	x	x	x
getShareOption		x	x
getSmartList*
getSolveOrder	x	x	x
getTimeBalanceOption		x	x
getTimeBalanceSkipOption		x	x
getUDAs		x	x
getUniqueName		x	x
isAttributesAssociated	x	x	x
isClientCachingEnabled	x	x	x
isDimensionRootMember	x	x	x
isExpenseMember		x	x
isFlowType	x	x	x
isIndependentDim	x	x	x
isInitialized	x	x	x
isMemberNameUniqueWithinDim*
isNameUnique		x	x
isRelationalDescendantPresent	x	x	x
isRelationalPartitionEnabled	x	x	x
isTwoPassCalculationMember		x	x

* Indicated results may be due to the member tested, 100-10, instead of the availability of the information exposed by the IEssMember.

As it appears that basically every property value is available when the outline is open, my intern is now working on prototyping a faster methodology for getting member information that I engineered. I will discuss this methodology once we have it implemented and shipping in Dodeca.

Speaking of Dodeca, we have been hard at work on Dodeca 5.0 and are now at the beta 2 milestone (which explains the sparseness of my blogging). I plan to start blogging on the numerous new features of Dodeca 5.0, along with continuing the Dodeca architecture overview I started in the fall, within the next few days.