Introduction

When an application is used to demonstrate sensitive information, a training class includes people that shouldn’t see live data, or security is being tested, often times using real data is not an option.  I have written PowerShell scripts and .NET applications to randomize data from Essbase exports, as well as Custom Defined Functions to randomize with calculations.  PBCS just made it much easier.  Using one EPMAutomate command all the data in all the applications can be randomized.  We don’t have the ability to control what is change, which would be a nice addition as I always excluded anything greater than 0 and less than or equal to 1 in an effort to exclude rates and things like a boolean true/false, or headcount.  But, the ability to do it in one command is mighty appreciated!

Masking Data in PBCS

In a recent update to EPM Automate, Oracle introduced a new method – maskData. It can’t get any easier to use.  Once you log in to EPM Automate, simply run maskData.

epmautomate maskData

When this is executed, it will ask you to confirm that you want to randomize the data in the application.  If you want to bypass the confirmation, add -f after maskData and it will force the command to run without confirmation.

Thank You Mr. Obvious

Be very careful using this!  Make sure you are logged on to test, and not production!

If you have jumped into Groovy Calculations, one of the things you likely would try to do is grab a value for a sub var.  Hopefully, you haven’t spent too much time before reading this.  I wasted a ton of time trying to get this to work before I opened a ticket with Oracle.  This class is NOT available yet and was inadvertently included in the public docs at https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/epm-common/GROOV/.  The development team told me they are going to remove it from the API docs.

Without it, the best way I have found to get this value is by adding it to a grid and pulling the dimension value from that column/row.  For example, if your periods are in the columns and you are need the value of a substitution variable that holds the current month, add the substitution variable to the first column for the variable that holds the current month of actuals, and hide the column so the users are not confused with its purpose/location.  If you make use of getCellWithMember, and don’t pass it any parameters, it will pull the top left cell in the grid, even if it is hidden.  Since this is a period member, use the getPeriodName method.  If it is a custom dimension, the getMemberName will provide what you need.

Here is an example.  The grid’s first column is hidden, and the period is set the substitution variable that represents the last month of actuals for the year.

String sCurMonth = '"' + operation.grid.getCellWithMembers().getPeriodName() + '"'
 - OR - 
String sCurMonth = '"' + operation.grid.getCellWithMembers().getMemberName("Period") + '"'

The sCurMonth variable can be used where needed in the Groovy calculation to obtain the substitution variable value.

Introduction

Groovy provides a very easy way to interact with the user via run time prompts, or RTPs.  These can be linked to dimensions, members, and input.  One of the huge benefits of getting RTPs in Groovy is that the result can be validated, and the calculation can be cancelled if they don’t validate (we will touch on this in a future post).

The Solution

This is one of the easier things to do with a Groovy calculation.  There are two things required.  First, the Groovy calculation must prompt the user to select a value.  This is done by doing the following.

/*RTPS: {RTP_Consolidate_Data}*/

At any point in the script after the above, the value can be used.  If it is going to be used multiple times, it might be easier to set a variable.  Regardless of the approach, the value can be referenced using the rtps object as follows.

 String sRTP
 sRTP = rtps.RTP_Consolidate_Data.toString()

That is all that is required!

Conclusion

Beyond the obvious uses of an RTP, I have started using these for a number of other reasons.

• On global forms where multiple values may be changed throughout a short period of time and execute long running calculations, like allocations, I have seen benefits of prompting a user with a yes/no smartlist RTP.  If the user has more changes, they may not need to execute the calculation after every save.  This gives them the option.
• If there is a requirement where some prompts are dependent on other prompts, using RTPs in Groovy gives you the flexibility to validate the combination.  For example, if an employee is set to hourly with a VP title, the prompts can be validated and returned to the user as invalid combinations before the prompts are removed from user view.