Importing Line Items with 4 or more dimensions to a Numbered List

In my model I have a number of modules that are dimensioned by 4 Lists, typically Time, Region, Resource and Product (e.g. hours worked by Resource A on Product B in Region C in Week D. I want to save changes to line items in these modules to a Numbered List with Time, Region, Resource and Product as Properties along with a Property for each line item in the module that I am looking to save. For modules dimensioned by 3 lists it is straightforward to create a View as the source of the Import with the 3 lists as Column items and the Line Items as Row items. Unfortunately this does not extend to 4 lists as you can not have 4 lists as Column items in the view pivot.

The only way I have found is to create an intermediate numbered list with 3 of the original dimension lists as Properties and then use this and the 4th original dimension list as the dimensions of an intermediate module that then pulls in the line items from the original module and has additional line items that return the List Items referenced by the Properties in the intermediate numbered list. This is very clunky, the intermediate numbered list has to be recreated each time in case the original lists have been updated, which results in a Clear action and an Import action, plus the extra effort and space taken by the intermediate list and module.

Has anyone discovered a better way?

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Answers

  • Hi Peter,

     

    Even for modules with 4 dimensions, the procedure remains same as explained by you for the case of module with 3 dimension. 

     

    In other words, the last dimension which is left at the top as page selector will be automatically pivoted by Anaplan as a column in the import mapping screen.

     

    Hope this solves your question. If not, let me know, so that I can show it with screen shots.

  • Sheethal whilst the mapping does indeed include the dimensions in the Page section the issue is with the filtering of the View to include only changed items (those that are non-zero in my case). The filter can be configured to work with the current page, a specific list item or the list summary, but none of these remove all entries where the value is zero.

  • Hi Peter,

     

    I am in a similar situation. I am trying to create a Numbered List from a module with 4 dimensions and few Line items. I would like to know how did you manage to do it? I am facing difficulties in mapping while creating the import.

     

    Any help will be really appreciated !!

     

    Thanks,

    Ak**bleep**

  • Hi Ak, we have continued to use the solution I identified in my first posting - that is, we take two of the dimensional lists and create a new list consisting of all valid combinations of the two dimensions and with a property for each dimension. We then use this new list and the remaining two lists as dimensions of a new module and create in that module a line item for each property of the new list as well as a line item for each of the original line items we wanted to import to the numbered list. We can then create a view that has the 3 dimensions as Row items and the Line Items as Column items which is filtered on one or more of the line items.

    If you would like a worked example of this let me know

     

    Peter