Tech Talks After Hours: Creating Entity Dimensions from a UD via Rules
On this advanced rule writing edition of Tech Talk After Hours, Ludo de Paz and Tom Linton review a use case where dashboard selections, data management steps, and extender business rules come together to create an Entity dimension from an existing User Defined Dimension via rules!
Key Topics Covered
- Business rationale: OneStream workflows are driven by the entity dimension — for planning by cost center, department, or market, it is often necessary to populate the entity dimension from a UD dimension rather than legal entities
- Real project example: geography dimension (markets like North America, Canada, Europe, US) flipped into the entity dimension for market-based planning, since the organization did not plan by legal entity
- Dashboard-driven execution: a control dashboard allows the admin to select which UD dimension to use as the source and which hierarchy/parent to target in the entity dimension — one hierarchy at a time
- UD dimension text properties: text fields 1–7 from the source UD dimension are copied into the corresponding entity dimension members, preserving descriptive metadata across dimensions
- Text 8/9 fields as routing mechanism: a specific text field (e.g., text 8 or 9) in the UD dimension stores the destination currency and parent member in the entity dimension, giving admins control over where each member lands
- Members vs. relationships: entity dimension creation requires two steps — creating members first, then creating the parent-child relationships; members without relationships become orphans
- Admin flexibility: the parent structure in the entity dimension can differ from the hierarchy in the source UD dimension, giving admins full control over how the planning hierarchy is shaped
- Incremental efficiency: the rule only processes members that are new or changed, avoiding full rebuilds and significantly improving performance on subsequent runs
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