Month entity without year

Fabiano Martino
Fabiano Martino Customer
5 Up Votes First Comment First Anniversary
edited June 2022 in Platform
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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Accepted Answer

  • Helmut Heimann
    Helmut Heimann Employee, Community Captain
    500 Comments 250 Likes Fourth Anniversary 25 Answers
    edited June 2022 Answer ✓
    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

    image

    Kind regards
    Helmut


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    Helmut Heimann
    Senior Consultant
    Board Community
    Germany
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Answers

  • Navan Mehra
    Navan Mehra Employee
    Third Anniversary 10 Comments 5 Up Votes Level 100: Foundations of Building in Board
    edited June 2022
    @Helmut Heimann - What I understand, the relationship would be something like this

    1. Month w/o year will have 1 to many relationships with Month entity. May month of "Month w/o year" will be connected to all May months
    2. Fiscal Year or Year when used in conjunction with "Month w/o year" will return the desired month.

    Is this correct understanding?

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    Navan Mehra
    Senior Consultant
    Board Community
    Australia
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  • Fabiano Martino
    Fabiano Martino Customer
    5 Up Votes First Comment First Anniversary
    edited June 2022
    Very informative.

    I will follow your instructions.

    Thanks
    Fabiano

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