Text List Objects and Text List Members

A cell that corresponds to a text measure can have one of a finite list of up to 1024 valid text values. Internally, Essbase needs to store the text values as numbers. Therefore, a mapping of text values to numeric values is required. You define the mapping between the text and numeric values by creating a text list object. A text list object consists of a list of text values and a numeric value that corresponds to each text value.

For example, you can create a text list object called “Customer Satisfaction Level” with the contents in Table 30. The Name column contains the possible text values for a text measure, and the ID column represents the internal numeric value used by Essbase.

Table 30. Example of a Text List Object

NameID
Missing#MISSING
N/A#OUTOFRANGE
High1
Medium2
Low3

Each text value must map to a unique numeric value. Any text value that does not map to an integer in the text list object is considered by Essbase to be invalid.

The first two IDs, #MISSING and #OUTOFRANGE, are for handling cases where the textual data is invalid or empty. For example, if a user attempted to load an unmapped value such as “Average” to a text measure, the cell value would not be updated, and would display as #MISSING in a subsequent query. If a user loads a numerical cell value which is unmapped, the subsequent query would return N/A.

Aside from #MISSING and #OUTOFRANGE , all of the other IDs must be integers.