Yeah, Its Back!!!

This will be a short post about the newly release Smart View version 11.1.2.5.700 that was released a few days ago. It seems what is old is new again. What am I talking about? The ability to pull in calc scripts(For Essbase)  into Excel, and run them directly from Excel.

Let me give you a little background. With the Essbase Add-in through the API (not the toolkit), I would use VBA code to pull in a calc script from the server. In the script I would have tokens like ~Entity. In Excel, I had a routine to change ~Entity to whatever entity the user selected. I would then execute the calc script directly from Excel. Nice custom focused calculations just like we now do in Business Rules. When Smart View came along and the API was removed, we lost that functionality.

Well now it is back! There are two new functions, HypGetCalcScript and HypExecuteCalcScriptString that allows me to do this again. It is funny, the use case I described is actually written into the description of HypExecuteCalcScriptString – From the readme “executes a calculation script along with substitution variables. This function allows you to customize the script string, or use portions of strings from different calculation scripts.”

That is not all that is included in this patch. There are a lot of other new features including a new HSGetAlias, changes to HSGetDescription, New features for PBCS, FCCS, OAC HFM, Chart support for Power Point, and a whole lot more. To see it all, you can look at the readme a

t https://updates.oracle.com/Orion/Services/download?type=readme&aru=21178353#smart_view_11125700_readme_174 (Yes Virginia, you do need a support identifier to get to this doc).

I’m excited to play with this new/Old functionality. Until Essbase 12c comes out with excel support for runtime prompts, the will be allow us to make our Essbase environments even better.