Continuing Adventures in Drill-Through

I’ve written twice already about drill through (here and here).  I still believe it is a very useful feature that many users can benefit from, but to be honest, it can be very frustrating when configuring. 

Our application has four BSO cubes with data being loaded from multiple files.  Files vary, different dimensionality and either single period or multiple periods of data.  We set up loads to the revenue and labor cubes with drill-through enabled, everything worked as expected.  Then we set up loads to the capital expense cube and we ran into issues.

The first load file was for actuals data and as such was for a single period.  Test loads were successful and drill-through functioned as expected.  The second load was for forecast data and needed to be configured as a multi-period load.  We had configured multi-period loads on both the revenue and labor cubes already, so we repeated the process.  The test load of data was successful, but drill-through did not work. 

We reviewed the configuration, everything looked correct.  We deleted the integration and rebuilt it, still didn’t work for drill-through.  We consulted with co-workers; we were all stumped.  So, I broke down and submitted a SR with Oracle. 

The technical representative responded quickly and provided a possible resolution; KM Note: 2068471.1 Drill-Through Doesn’t Work.  (Note: You may need to login to Oracle Support to access the article)

Drill-through is case sensitive, the error was a case mismatch between the mapped target member and the actual member name being passed back from the target.  Our source file for the forecast data load had “DRAFT1” for the version member.  But the planning application has the member name as “Draft1”.

A simple change to the mapping in the integration from “* to *” to an explicit with “DRAFT1” to “Draft1” corrected the case mismatch.

Another option to correct the issue would be to modify the source file to ensure the member names have the same case as the target members.  Use whichever method makes sense in your integration mappings when enabling drill through.  Drill-through is the only EPM feature that I have encountered that is case sensitive, and hopefully the only one. 

As always, happy EPM’ng!