Fundamentals Recap on Attributes

In FastClose, dimensions contain members, and members are things that you can add together.

For example the Measures dimension holds quantities that you can add together such as  Amount, Budget, Quantity, Invoice Balance, Stock on Hand - ie: - all things that can to some degree be meaningfully added to themselves.

Similarly if you were looking at the Time dimension, January can be added to February can be added to March and meaningfully makes a total for the Quarter.

However, there are many items which though they could be used in a calculation, can’t be meaningfully added together.

For example: Unit Cost. The Unit Cost of different items can’t be summed meaningfully.

Yet of course there are useful calculations that could use these items as terms in expressions, for example

Total Cost = Quantity * Unit Cost  

where we create a new measure called total cost based on a quantity measure multiplied by a unit cost attribute.

Items like Unit Cost are often found as "attributes" of dimensions.

Attributes can be found at many places in the User Interface by expanding a dimension, for example like this:

For a refresher on attributes, revisit the opening “Fundamentals” session and check out the final “Advanced” topic.

Calculations on Attributes

So taking Unit Price as an example – in the Sales Order Detail template:

• Unit Price can be found as an attribute of the Part dimension – which makes logical sense, a part should have a unit price.

• Unit Price can also be found as an attribute of the Sales Order Detail dimension – as Epicor copies it to the sales order line when processing the Sales Order.

The search box found at the top of most dimension lists is a very useful way of finding an attribute if you don’t already know in which dimension to find it.

Syntax

The value of an attribute can be accessed by appending the term “.Value” to the end of a dimension attribute term:   [Dimension].[Attribute].Value

For example:

• [Part].[UnitPrice].Value

• [Measures].[OrderDetail].[UnitPrice].Value

So if I wanted a calculation to describe the total price of a line in a sales order, I could write the calc as:

[Measures].[OrderQty] * [Part].[UnitPrice].Value

Remember: Because we want the result to be available in the [Measures] dimension, we place [Measures].[OrderQty] first as FastClose will then work out the dimension from that first term.

Creation in the User Interface

To create such a calc:

• Open the Calculations screen

• Find and select the OrderQty member in the [Measures] dimension and add that to the calculation using the “Add to Expression” area.

• Add a multiply sign

• Find the [UnitPrice] attribute of the [Part] dimension using the “Add to Expression” area and click once on the [UnitPrice] attribute to select it (but don’t yet add it to the expression).

• The right hand side will update (as shown in the diagram below) to display a list of all the unit prices for parts that FastClose can find. Seeing that they are all numeric is a visual clue that you have the correct attribute but more importantly the “Dimension Value” button (in blue) will enable.

  

• Click the “Dimension Value” button to add the attribute term to the calculation expression with the .Value extension.

Exercises and Tutorial Survey

05 Advanced Calculations - Attribute Calculations - Exercises.pdf

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