Good day,
I would like to ask for some help regarding how to compare cubes with different dimensionalities in Flex Grid.
Use case: we have a system running salary calculations. We have FTEs in one cube, dimensioned by Month, Cost center, Employee. We have actual Salaries in another cube dimensioned by Month, Cost center, Account, KPI, Currency, Product, Object.
I put the FTE cube as Block A, and the Salaries cube as Block B.
I try to put all dimensions (Month, Cost center, Account, KPI, Currency, Product, Object, Employee) on the axes, so the users have the flexibility to decide what they want to analyze the data by. As you see, some of them exist in both cubes, while some of them only exist in one cube.
Upon doing this, I immediately run into an issue: the system tells me there are no rows to show.
I know there is data there, and upon trying a few things out, I notice that removing the Employee entity from the axes solves this issue.
Question nr1: This No Rows To Show is the first big issue I am facing, and I would like to know if anyone has any explanations for this, and possibly a solution to solving it. I don't understand why the axes have no issues with some entities that are only in the cube in Block B (Currency, Object), put starts having issues with the entity that only exists in Block A (Employee).
-
The next issue is the FTEs I am seeing in the solution. To be able to display this well, I go back in Axes and add Year, and then I put Year on columns next to Month. I also add 202602 to my month selection.
In the screenshot above, I expect to see 11 FTEs. Instead I see 66. When I pull in more entities on rows and open the year, I find out how this happens: there are 2 months and 3 accounts that have Salaries information on them.
What the users need here is to always see 11 on the lowest level of the rows regardless of how many rows we have, similar to how it works with Dataviews. We can explain that if they put multiple entities on rows, the totals will be strange, but to have strange values when there is only 1 entity on rows (like when they only have cost centers on rows) is not something the users can work with.
I tried a workaround where I set the FTEs to Max, and that fixed the issue on the lowest level, however, it caused a new issue on totals instead.
When I close my Year and want to look at the totality of 2026, I still see the max FTE, and not the summary of the two months. So this makes using Max not a good enough solution.
Question nr2: How do I display FTEs in the example above so it shows 11 when there is only 1 entity on rows, but summarizes 2 months correctly into years?
-
For my final issue, I bring in a new cube onto Block C of my layout. This cube has the previous plan Salary data in it, and is structured by Month, Cost center, Account, KPI, Currency, Product, and entity "x". It is also dimensioned by Version, but we put a refer to on it.
As soon as I am done with this and pull block C into Values in the Fields, I am faced with my 3rd issue: the Flex Grid does not display any values for this column.
After some trial and error, I find that removing the Object entity from the axes (which exists in Block B, but not in Block A and Block C) displays the values. I did not have this entity on rows or columns, it was just added to the Axes, but that was enough to cause a problem.
I am having trouble understanding why this did not affect the values of Block A, and FTEs were showing so far, but in Block C, this became an issue. (The number of rows jumping to 9 can be explained by the data itself, it's not an issue)
Similarly, when I add entity "x" to the axis, I see data in Block C, but data from Block B (the cube of which does not have entity "x") disappears.
I suspected this had something to do with sparsities, but all 3 cubes have different sparsities. The Object entity is a sparse member of the cube in Block B, Entity "x" is a dense member of the cube in Block C, and just to reiterate, Block A has neither of these, but displays data with no issue.
Question 3: why does my data sometimes disappear for certain blocks?
I appreciate any guidance on these issues. I tried going through the documentation online, but I might have missed something, I welcome anyone pointing me in the direction of something I missed. I also would like to know if any of these issues are bugs and not issues with my setup, so I can file a ticket with support.
