Attachment as Comment in BPC 10.0

[gavin_du]

Comments in BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) 10.0 is widely used to describe transaction data for communication and collaboration in planning and consolidation activities. However, comment has its length limitation and can only carry text. In some cases, you might want to attach rich information to a particular data cell or a data slice so that people can get more insight about the data they are looking at. Here are some scenarios where attachment as comment is useful.

• In headcount planning, you might want to attach the new hire's resume for a reserved headcount


• In cost or travel planning, you might want to attach purchase order or quotation for a particular expense


• In sales planning, you might want to attach third party market forecast of different region for incoming years

You might wonder whether it is supported and how it is supported by BPC 10.0. Well, first I assure you that it's supported ever since the initial release of BPC 10.0 for both NetWeaver and Microsoft platform. And now I will introduce how to design a report to allow user to attach and view document as comment with a simple example.

Let's assume you have a report like below, add two columns on the right side of the report and use EPM formula EPMCellContextDocument() in these two columns. In below example, the first column is for user to upload attachment. You can see three parameters are passed in the formula. The first parameter "1" means "upload document", the second parameter is the data cell you want to comment on, and the third one is the text you want to display in the formula cell.

If you double click cell C2, it goes to BPC Web and opens Add Document dialog.

Notice the context is automatically filled with the dimension intersection of the data cell B2 from EPM Add-in.

Once uploaded, to view the documents from the report, double click cell D2, which contains another EPMCellContextDocument formula, with first parameter as "2", meaning "view document".

It then goes to BPC Web Documents (Content Library) page. All documents under the passed-in context will be listed and user can click to read each of the document.

As you can see, it's very easy to utilize the EPMCellConextDocument formula to attach and view documents as comments. Hope now you can design your own report according to your (or your customer's) business need.

Note:

• For more information about EPMCellConextDocument, please refer to EPM Add-in user guide.


• BPC Web Documents supports some file types by default, such as ".ppt" and ".pdf". If it's not enough for you, you can add new file types as instructed by note 1641922.