Business View DV Roles

In this section:

A traditional Business View offered users a customized logical view of a data source by grouping related items into folders that reflect business logic for an application, rather than the physical position of items in the data source. However, the fields in these folders did not have any indication of their roles in a request.

A traditional Dimension View, on the other hand, categorized fields on the basis of their roles in a request. Measures were placed in measure groups, hierarchies were organized within dimensions, levels were organized within hierarchies, and attributes were organized within levels. Dimension Views, however, offered no ability to create a custom logical view of the data source.

DV Roles in a Business View enable you to group fields into folders and, for each field, assign a role that indicates its role in a request. The syntax is clear and simple, and it gives you total flexibility in creating folders anywhere in the structure, and in reusing fields in multiple folders.

Assigning DV Roles

In Business Views, you define folders, which function as segments to provide a view of the synonym and to define the accessible fields and their relationships. Folder relationships are the same as segment relationships, with parent folders, child folders, and sibling folders.

While you have total flexibility defining a structure using any fields from your data source, when you issue a report request against the synonym, the retrieval path for the data must conform to any constraints imposed by your DBMS entity diagrams and by the rules of FOCUS retrieval.

You can explicitly assign a DV role to a folder or field, or have it automatically inherit its role from its parent. If you explicitly assign a DV role, that role moves with the object if you move it to another location within the BV structure. If you do not explicitly assign a DV role, the role changes as you move the object under a new parent, except if you move it onto a field with the Drill Level role. If moved onto a Drill Level field, the moved field inherits the Drill Level role.

The following DV roles can be assigned.

Example: Sample Dimension Folder Declaration

The DV_ROLE for the PRODUCT folder is DIMENSION.

 FOLDER=PRODUCT, PARENT=FOLDER1,
    DV_ROLE=DIMENSION, 
    DESCRIPTION='Product and Vendor', $