When working in Database Designer, is there a way to have a field listed as a property and a dimension? I currently have a field (disposition_id) as a property, but was thinking it may be useful to also have it as a dimension. By having it as a dimension, I could focus on all dispositions with a value of “B” and get a total. As it stands, I am only able to get to the disposition level when using Transaction mode.
Thanks,
Justin
I don’t know the answer, but if you can duplicate a column in the data you can make that happen. ( Disposition_id and another called disposition_id_property for example)
This duplicate hack is also true of a lot of the workarounds that get written about on this forum. All you have to do is lower your standards to accept non-elegant, brute force solutions. Come on over to the dark side…
While duplicating the column as @Steve_Shuman suggested will work just fine, if you add a column as a dimension it also gets added as a property automatically as well. So there may not be a need to duplicate the column.
To follow up on all of these, just keep in mind that items can be used as a property and dimension if the data exists under another “parent” dimension. For example, if you have a Customer dimension and you want a sub-dimension/property to be by Sales Rep for each customer, you can pull the Sales Rep under the Customer dimension, which will add it as a dimension, then, in the “edit” box for the new Sales Rep dimension, you can choose how it will also show as a Property when the Customer dimension is selected:
So if your Disposition_id is a property of another existing Dimension, you just have to make sure the data is available under that existing Dimension to make it work this way.
Otherwise, you could always make that duplicate column!
Also note that while the simplest way for the user is to have a dimension, if your data shows as a property against a dimension, you can hide all properties in that dimension and just show the property you want to get the same summarised data that you’d have if you’d added the dimension.
Sometimes you want the summary but without having 100s of dimensions.
Very good point @StuartH. This is a good way of handling summary when it’s occasionally needed, without drastically increasing DB build times by adding a bunch of rarely used dimensions! Something I’ve been working on to decrease our build times.
@Steve_Shuman, @aaron.roma, @tim.janes, @StuartH thanks for the great information. I am going to block some time today and try your suggestions in my test database.