Our team heard a rumor today from a customer that the ability to display both member names and aliases was not supported by the Essbase Cloud reporting tools. This sounded odd so I did a quick investigation to seek out the truth.

First, let’s reorient everyone to what reporting support exists in general for Essbase Cloud. For static reporting, look to these tools:

• Smart View
• EPRCS

Notice that Financial Reporting is not on the list above. FR is currently not a supported reporting technology for Essbase Cloud and I don’t know if it ever will be.

Also notice that I didn’t list the rest of the OAC technologies above. This is because I don’t consider them to fall in the arena of “reporting” tools. Instead, they provide support in the business intelligence arena: guided analytics through data visualizations and dashboards, etc. (This discussion is a post for another day…)

Second, let’s talk specifically about what this “displaying both member names and aliases” feature is about. This is the ability, through reporting or ad hoc, to display both the dimension’s member name and alias at the same time on a single grid.

Take this example, for instance. In the beloved Sample.Basic Essbase application, the Product dimension looks like this:

The member names are on the left and the default aliases/descriptions that correspond to those members are on the right. In reporting, the product member names alone aren’t very reporting friendly since they’re a bunch of ID’s. However, the product aliases don’t have the product ID in them, so they may also not be helpful for reporting. Hence, both might need to be displayed at the same time on a report.

So what is the truth about the ability to support this reporting feature?

I checked in both Smart View and EPRCS…

…and…

…have confirmed that all is good and well in the world of Essbase Cloud reporting! The ability to display both member names and aliases is indeed there.

Here is the ability within Smart View (I’m on the latest version, 11.1.2.5.710, but my buddy Gary Adashek confirmed that this was supported on previous versions):

Since it’s supported in Smart View, EPRCS Narrative Reporting automatically supports it.

And here it is in EPRCS Management Reporting:

The display might look a bit different between each reporting tool, but the feature is alive and well.