Cognos PowerPlay Transformer Guide - Time dimension
In this lesson we will create the time dimension and time levels in our sample Palm Nursery model. We will group the data by year in the highest hierarchy level and the most detailed level in the time dimension will be a week. The time source data is in the DT column in the model.
Time dimension
Time dimension is a special type of dimension. Cognos provides an automatic support for handling time dimensions which is working very well.
Go to Tools -> Date wizard (or use a date wizard icon located in the toolbar) and follow the wizard steps (values entered in our example in blue):
1. Provide name of the dimension - TIME
2. Choose Date Source Type ( Column ) and point the coumn name which contains date values ( DT ).
3. Do you want years in the dimension? Yes
4. Choose the kind of years between Calendar years (355 or 356 days) and Lunar years of 52 weeks
5. Do you want quarter-years in the time dimension? Yes
7. Do you want months in the time dimension? Yes
9. Do you want months in the time dimension? Yes
10. Do you want days in the time dimension? No
11. Choose the first day of the week. Default is Sunday, we will choose Monday
12. How to treat a week which spans a month? Split between the two
13. Enter ther first day of a particular year (yyyymmdd) - year value in this setting is not important. This options allows users for instance to report fiscal years starting from 1 March. We leave the default 20070101
14. Do you want to generate categories? If not needed, we suggest to generate them based on the data and do not generate a category for each day. No
We can see a new time dimension in the Dimension Map of the model:
The time dimension levels in the PowerCube are depicted below:
