Loading multiple UDAs into Essbase using load rules

The art of building dimensions into an Essbase cube (on-prem) is becoming a lost art Most Essbase applications are actually planning applications which means you use Planning interface to load metadata. However, if you are using straight up Essbase applications and want to build dimensions, load rules are still the preferred way to do so.

Essbase load rules are interesting because they use “codes” for certain properties, like storage, consolidation etc. See below a screenshot from Oracle for more information.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/essbase/21/essdm/use-source-data-work-member-properties.html

This blog post is not going to go into too much detail, but will tackle a simple problem some of you may run into when loading multiple UDAs into an dimension. If your data ( or metadata to be precise) file contains more than one column for UDAs, the load rule needs to be tweaked a little to get them to load successfully.

Let’s take a look at an example file with multiple UDAs.

The first step is to create a load rule, or update an existing one.

Go to the “Dimension Build Settings” Tab, and check the “Allow property Changes” box. Also, uncheck the “Allow UDA Changes” box. It sounds counterintuitive but this is how it was designed, so trust me on this.

Close the window, and now start setting each column’s field settings. For each of the UDA columns, select the dimension, and select UDA from the available options. Also, scroll down and give it a number in increasing order, starting at 0 as shown in the image below.

Do this for all UDA columns, and your load rule should look like below.

Validate the rule file, and proceed to build dimension.

Feel free to contact me for any clarifications or consulting work.