Hyperion Planning Application Definition

If you had to create exact replica of a Hyperion Planning Application, knowing how to check Application definition of your planning apps comes in very handy.

For example, if you want to know what PlanTypes your planning application has or what kind of Weekly distribution has been set or if your planning application has been set for Multi-currency or not, etc can come very handy.

This is how you can achieve this using Hyperion Shared Services.

The steps:
1. Log in to Hyperion Shared Services.

2. Under "APPLICATION MANAGEMENT" expand
                 Application Groups
                           Planning. (You will see the list of all planning applications that you have)

3. Choose the application by clicking it.

4. On the right, under "ARTIFACT LIST" expand
                  Configuration
                            Properties (You will see "Application Definition" and "Application Settings")
5. Right-click "Application Definition" and "Export to Edit."

6. It will prompt you to SAVE the file in your local drive. The file extension is XPAD, which you can open using any text editor, such as NotePad or TextPad. You can also open it in Excel as "an XML table." In fact, you can open it in Excel and create a table of all your applications for easy access. 

The content of an XPAD file would look something like this - where you would get all the information that you would require to create a planning replica application:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

 <application datasource="Candy" instanceName="Default" name="Sample" description="Candy application" project="Planning" calculationModule="BUSINESS_RULE" >

 <PlanningAppType>GENERAL</PlanningAppType>

 <Calendar>

 <BaseTimePeriod>12 Months</BaseTimePeriod>

 <WeeksDistribution>445</WeeksDistribution>

 <AppStartYear>2012</AppStartYear>

 <FiscalYearStartDate>SameCalendarYear</FiscalYearStartDate>

 <StartMonth>Jan</StartMonth>

 <NumberOfYear>9</NumberOfYear>

</Calendar>

 <Currencies>

 <DefaultCurrency>USD</DefaultCurrency>

 <MultiCurrency>N</MultiCurrency>

</Currencies>

 <PlanTypes>

 <ValidForPlan1>Y</ValidForPlan1>

 <Plan1Name>Candy</Plan1Name>

 <ValidForPlan2>N</ValidForPlan2>

 <ValidForPlan3>N</ValidForPlan3>

 <ValidForPlan4>N</ValidForPlan4>

 <ValidForPlan5>N</ValidForPlan5>

</PlanTypes>

</application>

How to check and see if Oracle Account is expired, locked, or open

In the EPM world, things are tricky sometimes because of too many things inter-related for the EPM system to work as a whole.

It comprises of several things
     The EPM System itself which is made up of several things - the most common, for example, being, Shared Services, Foundation, Essbase, Planning, plus the reporting and analysis tools - the financial reporting studio and web analysis. Then we have the Print services which seems very trivial but of equal importance and the Ghostscript (at least in the 11.1.2. version).
     Then, we have Smartview or Excel add-in and Web Logic
      Last but not the least, one of the most important piece of software - the database. We have the 11G in this case.

While working in the EPM environment, a slight issue in any of the above-mentioned area can lead up to errors, and because of the magnanimity of the EPM structure, the numbers of log files it creates, and the hard-to-remember path, it is sometimes a pain-in the-neck to resolve the issue.

Let me share this. Our secondary system was working fine and suddenly, one fine morning, while trying to pull up a financial report in workspace, it threw out an error. After having checked all the logs, checking the documentation, and doing some GOOGLE, we came to find out that the BIPLUS account password had expired. We never knew that those passwords would expire. It took so long to find out the cause of the error, however, after getting the information regarding the password expiry, all we had to do was set the password again and we were ready to rock.

In such cases, it is handy to check and see if any of the Oracle user accounts have expired. This is how you do it.
Open SQLPLUS.
Enter admin Username and ENTER
Enter password and ENTER
Now on the SQL> prompt, you can type in the command:
           SELECT username, account_status
           FROM dba_users;
It will give you a list of USERNAMEs and ACCOUNT_STATUS
ACCOUNT_STATUS will be OPEN, EXPIRED, or EXPIRED & LOCKED