[CAFE 10.2] How to debug a "Refresh error" of a flex view?

[hittony]

Hi,

We combine TM1 and CAFE for a sales planning tool.

Now a user is failed to refresh a flex view in her Excel file, where she was used to do some refresh and commit in the past months. However there's no problem with other flex views in other Excel files. When she click refresh button, she can see "Refreshing data" as status on the right of the view in the CAFE pane, but nothing is refreshed with the status changed later to "Refresh error", the same for the Cognos Admin account.

On the same computer, we switch to another windows account, in the same file, the problem doesn't happen again. We change a computer, the problem doesn't happen again either.

Can anyone kindly share her/his experience or suggest how to find the cause ?

Thanks

Regards

[paulsimon]

Hi

I recently came across a case with Cognos BI. I am not sure what CAFE does behind the scenes but it may be similar.

An external consultant had edited a dimension to add a consolidation. This meant that the MUN Path to an element was now Measures->Consol X->Elem Y. However the BI Report containing the element was not updated and still had the MUN Path as Measures->Elem Y. The security was also not changed so end-users were unable to see the new Consol X element.

Strangely, because security did not allow the end-users to see the new consolidation, the BI Report with the MUN for Elem Y as Measures->Elem Y, still ran correctly. However, if someone with Admin Rights who therefore had security rights to the new consolidation ran the report they got a BI error saying that Measures->Elem Y could not be found because it expected the MUN Path to be Measures->Consol Y->Elem Y. This took 2 of us 3 days to find, as it is probably the first case I have come across where you get an error because you have too much security access rather than too little.

I am wondering if you perhaps have a similar situation in CAFE. If the FlexView works using MUNs like BI, then perhaps it has stored a MUN that used to be valid, but if you have perhaps changed a hierarchy then perhaps the MUN is no longer valid. However, it is still working for users who don't have access to the new consolidations that have been introduced. I am not sure that this helps much. I haven't experimented enough with CAFE to know how you would go about verifying this and fixing it. There are some areas on the IBM site related to the COGNAME formula which does include a MUN.

Regards

Paul Simon

[silw]

Try to delete all very hidden sheets. Sometimes they cause this problem.

[BrianL]

Have you tried enabling any of the CAFE logging? In the options dialog you can try bumping up the logging level. Then next time the issue is seen, look in the logs for more detailed messages.