Addendum to Data Export post

As an addendum to my post on Data export, John Goodwin reminded me of a work around I had to do. There is a problem when you are exporting to a relational table and your columns dimension does not have values in the trailing members (for example you have Jan-Dec in columns and you only have data in Jan –Mar) the data export will fail because the record columns don’t match the table columns. . In order to get around it, I set :
DataExportDynamicCalc On
And
DataExportLevel ALL

Then in my fix statement, I had to make sure that the last column of the load would always have data. Testing it by sending it to a flat file confirmed that if the last column had data, the intermediate columns would have something as well. In Sample Basic if Years is your column dimension, in your fix statement you could fix on Jan:Dec and Year. Since Year is a dynamic calc member if any month has data so will Year. Note, this could be be a problem if you have time balance accounts without skip missing turned on). Because you need to set all levels, you also have to make sure you fix on the level zero members of your other dimensions as well. I set the other dimensions to @relative (dimension name, level zero). Since the last column had data it would load to the end.

In talking with others, they have had problems with Data export, So far, I’ve not found anything I could not work around.