Raise the limit of Custom Time Entities on Time Range

Lucas Charello

Main Idea:

Today, the number of Custom Time Entities is limited to 4. My idea would be to raise this limit number to at least 10. It would be great to have no limit, if possible.

The last project I worked on lasted 40 days. If I had a free custom time entity, I could have saved around 3 to 4 days of work, which is a significant amount.

Explanation :

Custom time entities are very useful when building modules like Forecast & Reforecast and separing them from Montly Actual P&L, for example. They help us to save time and build in a more efficient way.

Custom entities allow us to bring up different timelines or set up parents to the main timeline that will make considerably easier to build reportings and procedures. In some cases, it's almost impossible to meet customer request without using those. In other cases, without a custom entity, we often have to compensate using cubes and filters. When we do so, the structure gets heavier and a substantial amount of time is lost due to unforeseen adversities and/or limitations on layouts/procedure.

Some examples of time-consuming adversities are: Known limitations on Vertical aligned Dataviews and the impossibility to use filters when we have a block with an aggregation function on a layout.

The current menu can be found on Data Model > (Database name) > Time range > Custom entities.

Lucas Charello

Another insight I had later when discussing with my colleagues: The last remaining Custom Time entity is probably never used as we tend to be fearful of needing it more in the futur. We will always try to find a workaround and do not use this awesome functionality to its full!