Loading Hyperion Planning Metadata In 5 Easy Steps using OAS

I have resisted adding a Hyperion Planning metadata loader to Olap Automation Studio (OAS) for a long time due to the fact that tools like ODI, Informatica and the out of the box Outlineloader.cmd utility all do this function. But on the request of a few users who felt that the current tools are too difficult to use and at times a bit overkill for what they want to do. I decide to implement this in OAS with the goal of improving easy of use and the time it takes to create such an automation. Below is a step by step guide to using OAS with the new Hyperion Planning metadata loader operation.

Step By Step Guide to Loading Hyperion Planning Metadadata

Step 1) Create a Planning connection in OAS. Right mouse click connections from the OAS tree and create a new connection. Choose "PLANNING" as the connection type (see figure below).

Step 2) Create a planning dimension table. A table is a logical view of the properties for a dimension in a Planing application. Find the new connection you just created above, then right mouse click the connection name from the OAS tree then click "create table" from the popup menu. Choose "planning dimension" as the table type (see figure below).

Clicking next will take you to this screen below. Click the "Retrieve Hyperion Planning Dimension Info" button to retrieve the list dimensions. Choose a dimension from the Dimensions drop down box then click "Load sample data" to view a list of properties for that dimension.

Clicking next will take you to this screen below. Here you can choose which properties you want to load into the dimension. Most properties are optional but the first two are required for loading a dimension table. In this case the the Account dimension load would require at least the Account, and Parent properties. Check "Alias:Default" to load a default alias. Click "Finish" to save the table.

Step 3) Next we need to create a mapping object to tell OAS where to get the source data to load the dimension table we just created. Right mouse click "mappings" uder the OAS library tree then click "Create Mapping" from the popup menu. The Create mapping wizard allows for mapping columns from two tables. In this example screen below the source is a sql server table and the target is a Hyperion Planning dimension table.

Click next to map the columns then click "Finish" to save the mapping.

Step 4) The final step is to create a task using the CopyData operation. This is a generic operation that will copy data from many different sources including text files and sql database tables to Hyperion Planning.

The CopyData operation requires one "mapping" property. Choose the mapping we created earlier from the dropdown box in the Value column then click "Finish" to create the task.

Step 5) Before we can execute the task we need to create an automation. You can do this quickly by right mouse clicking the task name we just created above and clicking "Automate Task" from the popup menu. This will create an automaion with one task with the name defaulting to the name of the task and the word "Automation"

Execute the planning metadata load by right mouse clicking the automation we created above and clicking "Run Automation."

Log into Hyperion Planning to see that the data is loaded.

Assumptions

In this post I am assuming the reader has some familiarity with OAS but even if you have never used OAS before you should be able to download and install OAS in 10 minutes and create this load just as quickly and easily as you see here.

We have tested this loader operation on Hyperion Planning from verson 9.3 to the freshly release 11.1.2.

To get a tutorial and introduction to OAS click here.