Time Hierarchy without date

Question

Hi,

As I have seen the periods in EBS or PeopleSoft for GL (GL Periods) can be of Type Yearly,Quarterly, Monthly or Weekly.

I guess mostly the Monthly Accounting Period is used across GL Accounting, and currently I trying to create Reporting Layer for General Ledger Module of EBS from which I will be creating Balance Sheet or P&L reports.

I am in the process of creating time hierarchy , as I can see there is no Date involved in GL Periods table, All I wanted to know is if I can create Time Hierarchy without date and  with only following levels.

1. Year

2. Quarter

3. Month

4. Week (If required).

The above details are available in the EBS source table (GL_PERIODS).

Regards,

Max

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Of course AGO will work.

Forget about the name "time series functions", they don't need a real date at all ...

The AGO function will use the chronological key you define on your levels of the time hierarchy to move forward or backward by calculating how many elements it's navigating (it's really done by counting number of steps forward or backward in the list of elements ordered by the chronological key).

So it doesn't require a date, all you need is a column acting as "driver" for these calculations, and that's the column you set as chronological key.

For example you can set a geographical hierarchy as time dimension and calculate an AGO 1 country at the country level, what OBIEE will return you is the values of the country before the one you selected by ordering by the chronological key. It's of course a really strange concept to apply AGO to countries, but OBIEE will not really care as long as it's configured as a time dimension.

So your dimension without dates with year, quarter and month will perfectly work for AGO, TODATE, PERIODROLLING.

user8206283 · Answer

Hi,

Sure will try it creating without any date and my last level would month and will not have week.

I was just thinking if ago would work in this case.

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Hi,

The "time hierarchy" is just a normal hierarchy with levels. No need to contains any real date/time field ...

All you need is levels with columns that can be used a chronological keys. Often these will be the same as the logical level key, unique columns at that level that can be used for sorting and drills etc.

So you can of course make a time hierarchy with just week and no date.

Just double check if weeks are really children of month, in a real calendar weeks can cover 2 months, so they generally aren't children of months, just check that or your hierarchy will be wrong (1 week having 2 parents months).