firstly… many thanks from a ‘lurker’ on this list for the help and advice i’ve picked up from you all but…
(and forgive me - i am a absolute novice with business objects) when importing data from personal data files (eg a tab delimited txt file) BO insists on defining one column as a measure (numeric) when it is a dimension (alphanumeric) - the column contains a mixture of ID numbers which are totally numeric or alphanumeric
how can i specify that the data is imported as a dimension (a character string) ?? many thanks for your help
roger
when importing data from personal data files (eg a tab delimited txt file) BO insists on defining one column as a measure (numeric) when it is a dimension (alphanumeric) - the column contains a mixture of ID numbers which are totally numeric or alphanumeric
how can i specify that the data is imported as a dimension (a character string) ?? many thanks for your help
do not click the “run” button, but the “view data” first in the query panel (I’m not sure about the exact button names, I use german version of BO), there you can define the object’s qualification (dimension/information/measure)
WM
Walter Muellner
Delphi Software GmbH, Vivenotgasse 48, A-1120 Vienna, Austria Tel. +43-1-8151456-12, Fax: +43-1-8151456-21 e-mail: w.muellner@delphi.at, WEB: http://www.delphi.at
Other than changing the object to a Dimension ‘after’ it makes its way into BO, the only other solution is to make all of the values in the column TEXT. Since there is a mixture of pure numeric, and alphanumeric, BO reads determines which ‘type’ populates more than 50% of the values. You most likely have over half of the values as pure numeric, hence it is brought in as a Measure object.
You can create a formula in EXCEL that returns that column concatenated with a single quote in the front, and it you can import this column into BO instead of the original. This ‘converted’ column will read as text and be transformed into a Dimension object.
Be aware that Zeros have the high possibility of importing as NULL values otherwise. Good luck to you.