Lookup parent values in a non-composite (ragged) hierarchy

In as much detail as possible, describe the problem or experience related to your idea. Please provide the context of what you were trying to do and include specific examples or workarounds:

enable the LOOKUP: of calculated values in a non-composite hierarchy

How often is this impacting your users?

frequently (every implementation)

Who is this impacting? (ex. model builders, solution architects, partners, admins, integration experts, business/end users, executive-level business users)

model builders and business/ end users

What would your ideal solution be? How would it add value to your current experience?

simply enable a lookup on an already calculated value - as opposed to having to recalculate a value that already exists with a complex set of rigid workarounds.

Please include any images to help illustrate your experience.

Comments

alexpavel

@tscott I totally agree… I think there were already some discussions related to this, but they were always discarded because the technical documentation said it does not work.

It's amazing that this is listed as "not possible" option for the ragged hiearchies, especially that the cell value is already there…calculated….the SELECT works..

What is SELECT than a LOOKUP hard-coded? :) .

LOOKUP works only for the 1st immediate parent, but for all the other ancestors..it does not.

I think there is some kind of behind-the-scenes reason why this limit (similar to the Anaplan versions that cannot use LOOKUP !?), but I am still amazed that was not addressed and solved in these years.

There are quite a lot of situations where ragged hierarchies are needed:

in complex P&L structures: not all the accounts have (or need to have) the same number of detailed levels
whenever in a simple balanced hierarchy is needed some aggregations and we would like not to have additional "dummy" parents added to balance the hieararchy. A very simple solution would be that the hierarchy to be transformed in a ragged hierarchy without loosing the possibility to reference upper levels values.

I hope this will soon be taken into account.

Alex

tscott

Completely agree. as I've learned more about Anaplan, I found ragged hierarchies to be incredibly powerful & efficient. There are other frustrating quirks about ragged hierarchies (e.g. when building the structure you have to use the name of the parent rather than the parents code) that I wish anaplan would look into.

As you say this one is particularly irritating as the value is there but simply not retrievable in a dynamic (lookup) way.

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