Consolidating Text and Date Measures

By default, text measures are assigned the “^” (never consolidate operator). Text and date measures are not consolidated to higher level members along non Accounts dimensions.

If you tag a text or date measure with an operator other than “^”, it will be consolidated along other dimensions based on its internal numeric value. This is not recommended for aggregate storage databases, because only the + operator is supported, and the aggregated values likely will not have any validity for text or date measures. Additionally, Essbase does not translate out-of-range values to #OUTOFRANGE during consolidation.

For block storage databases, you can write calculation scripts that consolidate text measures in a custom fashion. You might want to consolidated text measures when they represent ranking measures. For example, consider a text list named "CustomerSatisfaction", which contains mappings such as Excellent=5, Good=4, Fair=3, Poor=2, Bad=1. The values are loaded at level 0. You can consolidate values to parent levels by taking an average of values at child levels. For example, the value of “CustomerSatisfaction” at [Qtr1] is the average of values at [Jan], [Feb], [Mar].