MicroStrategy ONE

Consolidations: Virtual attributes

One of the powerful advantages of consolidations is the ability to create virtual attributes, which allow you to group attribute elements in a customized way.

For example, you need to analyze data by season (Fall, Winter, and so on) although your project does not contain a Season attribute. Your data warehouse does not store data at the seasonal level. But your project does have a Month attribute. You can create a Seasons consolidation with four consolidation elements: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. Each consolidation element is made of Month attribute elements (December, January, and February for Winter, and so on). Each consolidation element produces one row of the report. When you use the consolidation on a report, you can aggregate data at a level other than that of the report's predefined attributes. In other words, you now effectively have a Seasons attribute in your project.

Consolidation elements do not have to be based on a single attribute or on addition, as described in this example. You can use any simple arithmetic operation, attributes at different levels, and unrelated attributes. For more information, see Creating consolidation elements and Consolidation element expressions.

For more details and examples, see the Custom Groups and Consolidations chapter of the Advanced Reporting Help.

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