Custom Time Entity

Khaleelah

Hello Friends,

I have a requirement and wanted to know how to approach it according to board best practices.

I have a requirement whereby during the year i have two student intake namely April and October.

Example ; Current Year 2024, April 2024 and October 2024 are my two intakes.

I need to split the April intake sales over 12 mths from April 2024 to march 2024 and similarly for October intake from October 2024 to September 2025 . For October it is over 2 fiscal years. Thats not the issue though

I wanted to create a custom time entity MonthOfIntake with Apr and Sep as members which will be parent to Month as below. In such a way the data is available at year / fiscal year level.I Is it a good approach, should monthofintake be related to Year , fiscal year or it should be related only to month and day but will inherit the other entities such as Year , fiscal year.

Note im not using the custom entity MonthOfIntake yet cause i dont know all that it takes for it to work properly

End Result is like below, i have created normal entities year_ and month_ which is month of intake and year of intake. But i believe since it is not in the time range, the relationship with the core time entities may not be respected or difficult to maintain. Any advice please

Thanks

Edward Ervin

The above approach is fine in adding to the Time Tree, there are some things you need to consider with Custom Time Entities and the time tree in general. The main point being you must always have every relationship of direct and indirect entities mapped. There cannot be any gaps, this is especially important to consider when expanding the time range, you will need to update your mappings at this time.

More information can be seen here within the Board Community

Custom Time Entities – Generic Month example — Board Community

As for where you should put your parent, you should think about how you want to view the data based on the information provided I would add it to either fiscal year or year.

The reasoning is that if every month in a year will have the same mapping anyway put it at the next level, similarly if every quarter in a year will have the same mapping then put it at the next level.

If 5/12 months will have one mapping and the other 7/12 have another then you will need to put it at the month level.

Adding it at year/fiscal year level will add other benefits such as being able to view the breakdown by quarter more easily.

Khaleelah

Hi Edward,

Thanks for the explanation. In my case i will use only 2mths per year as intake. Correct me if im wrong, if i keep monthofintake as parent of month and mapped all indirect and direct relationships , it will work fine.?

Otherwise if i map to year which is ok also , but how would i change the tree. if year becomes the parent of monthofintake, where should it be in the diagram . Is it before quarter that is monthofintake will become parent of quarter? im not sure

Navan Mehra

Hi @Khaleelah,

There could be 2 ways to manage this

1. Custom Time Entity Approach

The MonthOfIntake should be above Month similar to Year or Fiscal Year. You need to have 2 separate entities, one for SepIntake and one for OctIntake. AprIntake will have members as Apr2024, Apr2025 while OctIntake will have members like Oct2024, Oct2025, etc. It is very much like how Year and Fiscal Year are 2 separate entities used to represent 2 different month ranges. This is required as 1 member cannot roll up to 2 members of the same parent entity.

2. Standard Entity Approach

In this approach, you create a single entity that will have both Apr and Oct intake members. You then maintain a cube to define the valid combinations for each member. You then use this cube as the dynamic selection for months based on the selected member of the intake member.

With this approach, You need to be careful how you do the selection on screen. If you dynamically filter the Month entity then make sure Intake entity has a fixed selection and not a dynamic selection, otherwise the system would get confused, which one should get preference.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep
Apr2024 Intake				1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
Oct2024 Intake										1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1

Khaleelah

Hi Navan,

Im not sure why i will need two entities oct and april, because 1 member will never rollup to 2 members of the same entity.

I have to members in monthly intake , April and October

Thus month April 24 will have April as Parent and October 24 will have October as parent . Its a many to one relationship. Correct me if im wrong since im new to board.

Actually i have tried it, it is working for month and month of intake , however it is not retrieving the monthofintake correctly if i select a year. Year is parent to Month.

I do not know if im getting the relationship wrong or the parent. But since Year is parent to month, if i select a monthofintake example October, it does return all October months (irrespective of year). But when i want to set the October Intake for a particular year, it does not work. I have done the mapping again etc.

Any idea please

Thanks

Khaleelah

hello Friends,

I was able to solve my issue. Key point here is to ensure that data in the tree is coherent.

My issue was on Year category to Day

Year category =current year = jul 2023 - june 2024

Day was being mapped from 01 Jan 2024 to 31 Dec 2024 which is incorrect. Corrected this then below works fine with filters