Creating On-Update Triggers

When creating on-update triggers, consider the following information:

Consider data security when sending e-mail alerts. When Essbase activates a trigger and sends an e-mail, it cannot check whether the e-mail recipient is authorized to see the data referenced by the trigger condition.

Avoid referencing a sparse dimension member in a trigger condition. When Essbase executes a trigger on one data block, it must read another data block that may or may not be updated. Depending on the state of the second block, Essbase may activate the trigger in error.

The following example is based on the Sample.Basic database. Assume that East and West are sparse dimensions and that the following statement defines the trigger condition:

FIX (East, West, Sales, Jan, Actual, Cola)
IF ((Sales -> East + Sales -> West) > 20)
EMAIL sales@.com 

Assume that the following Sales data values are stored for East and West:

Now assume that a user does a lock-and-send request to update the data values:

When Sales->East is updated to 15, temporarily, the database contains the following values:

So Essbase activates the trigger because 15 plus 6 is greater than 20. Subsequently, Essbase updates Sales -> West to 3. Now the data does not meet the trigger condition, because 15 + 3 < 20. However, Essbase has already activated the trigger.

When a data load is followed by a calculation, if both the loaded data and the calculated data meet the trigger condition, Essbase activates the trigger twice, once on the data load and once on the calculation.