effect of deleting categories

[stormcloudgathering]

Hi
I have a massive model file with lots and lots of categories.
I have many dimensions most of which have manual levels, and have been advised not to clean house on these dimensions as I will lose the structure of the manual levels (is this true?!)
I need to delete some categories from the category viewer - I've saved a copy of the model file (call me cynical!)
but want to know the effect of deleting categories in the dimensions with the manual levels.
The reason behind this is that I keep getting a uniqueness violation because some of the data has changed and the old categories are hanging around causing problems.
If I delete the lower most levels in my dimension where the top level is manual what will happen?
Thanks v much
lynne

 

[ianhawksey]

Hi Lynne

if you clean house, you will potentially lose those children under the manual levels if they have not been touched. if they then need to be included in subsequent cube updates, the catgories will be brought back into the cube as orphans (because you removed the parent/child relationship with clean house!)
one potential way round this problem is to use unique move on the unique levels. however, it is difficult to determine at this point if this is valid in your situation. a unique move will effectively stop you getting uniqueness violations, as it will treat the potential 'violation' as a 'request to move', thereby giving you one child per parent. whether the right (ie new)child will be with the right parent is difficult to say from here - i would need more info.

hope this helps

regards

Ian

 

[JerrySmith123]

One way to test whether you'll lose them after cleaning house is to just save you PYI or MDL as something else (like test.pyi)...do the clean house, look at the categories through the category viewer icon,
then generate categories from your source and look at the categories again. Did they disappear? If so - then that's probably a bad option. If your manually created levels survived... you might be able to do in on the real model rather than the test model.

I'm very apprehensive about cleaning house on any manually created parent child relationships....because of the possiblity/probability of losing them.

 

[CognosProfessional]

Highlight the 1 dimension that is trouble and type in a date for clean house in that specific dimension that is an older date ,after checking an example of a category that keeps causing problems.

Otherwise, always go back to the categories dialog box and do a 'fit in window' on the level or dimension of categories that you want to get rid of and just delete them directly without deleting the ones that are manual.
CP