Mysterious statement in documentation for Capacity Rules

[Former Member]

Quote from the PCM help:

"A Capacity Rule can be used to create Alert messages to warn users about certain limits being reached or, if more detailed script is written, then there is also the potential to change values in relevant circumstances."

Those are my italics.  The italicised bit is intriguing, but I can't find any more detail.  Anyone know what it means?

Thanks

Steve

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Since Capacity Rules are triggered to run after model calculation, they cannot influence any previous model calculation or values.

I think the "potential to change values" here relates to the CellValue of the Capacity Rule itself.

The cellvalue of a capacity rule will trigger the Capacity Alert mechanism.

Setting it to a zero value will not trigger anything, which is very helpful in case you want to optimize reporting performance using CalculateSlice functions.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Jef

Thanks for the quick reply.  I think I understand what you're saying.

Just my opinion, but I don't know that I'd ever assign a CellValue for a Capacity Rule.  It looks like no matter what (non-zero) value you assign to the CallValue, you always get back the same message in the Model Alerts ("Critical Capacity Detected"), which doesn't help much in either identifying the dimension members where there's a problem or even telling you which Capacity Rule triggered the alert.  It's better, I think, for the Capacity Rule not to return a value, and instead use RaiseCapacityAlert() to put a meaningful message into the Model Alerts.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Totally agree.

I prefer to use RaiseCapacityAlert() as well.

It's indeed a weird sentence in documentation, but I don't think there's more to it