Cognos Planning Analyst and Hierarchy Data

I am a new COGNOS developer and in my first project on cognos planning, we was designing a model for a company with 5 level hierarchy in products data. I faced the ploblem of representing them in the same hierarchry. Such that planner can drill down and up throw them. 

Hierarchy Data

In any bussines application you will find a Hierarchy Data. And it is so easy now to represent in database with to many ways. what about cognos planning ?

Cognos Anlayst: Designing Model

In cognos analyst you build the data model used in planning so you have to represent Hierarchy Data in way that you can keep track of the relation between them.

Assume the following example:

company has products in 3 level hierarchy: product no., size, category

if you create one D-list for each level, and insert them in sales D-cube you will have the cartesian product of them which is wrong since every category has special products.

Solution:

      You may know how to import all of them in one D-list and the hierarchy will be represented as subtotals (while import define parent relations, you can define up to 9 levels). then make the D-cube with products D-list.

now you want to enable drill down on the hierarchy. you will need to create a dimention for each hierarchy with upper level data, for example:
cat1 has s1 size and p1,p2 products
cat2 has s2 size and p3,p4 products
create D-list for products with size and category, another one for size and contains category and category D-list  

simply build a D-cube for each hierarchy. (replace products with the other dimention like category and save as new D-cube)

then create D-links between the products sales D-cube and other D-cubes from bottom up to allow drill down then if your plan model use up down schema create the corresponding D-links.
This will work fine but take not from redundancy even in different level of hierarchy

Thanks for your reading, and feel free to contact me for details or suggestion.

Muhammad Eissa,

m.eissa85@gmail.com