Month entity without year

Fabiano Martino

Hi,

I'm using a dataview for sales analysis.
On the rows I have the year entity.

I need to put the month on the columns, to get 12 columns of data (1 for each month).
If I use the Month entity I get one column for each month of each year. My Year entity has 5 years, so I get 60 columns.

Can the month name be extracted from the Month entity, to get the name (eg.: Jan, Feb, ...) without the year?

Thanks
Fabiano

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Fabiano Martino
Senior Developer
A.F.I.S. G. CLERICI SPA
Italy
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Helmut Heimann

Hi @Fabiano Martino,

a month without the year is something that appears quite often in our requirements. The way you would build that up depends on the purpose.
Usually, we use a custom time entity for that, let's call it "Month w/o year". This will be linked to the "real month" via a custom relationship. So, when you select a year, the DataView will of course display the appropriate months but without the year (just "May" instead of "May.22", although it still is May 2022, due to the before mentioned relationship you'll have to configure and populate). If you don't have this relationship you will not be able to use the select on the year in conjunction with your desired months.

The steps to achieve this are as follows:

1. Go to the Time Range settings of your database
2. Create a custom time entity "Month w/o year"
3. Populate the members manually "Jan" through "Dec"
4. Edit the custom time relationships -> set "Month w/o year" to being a parent of the original "Month" entity.
5. Save the relationship 
6. Extract the time tree
7. Build a CSV DataReader to read the extracted tree and populate the new time tree using ETL to build the correct code for "Month w/o year"; you don't need to use "append" because the time entity is already filled - the DataReader will update the relations.
8. Run the DataReader
9. Check your custom time entity and -relationships using the "Analyze" function in the time range

It should be looking something like this



Kind regards
Helmut


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Helmut Heimann
Senior Consultant
Board Community
Germany
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