What is a Generic Model?
Generic modelling has the goal of satisfying customer requirements in way that takes into account future needs and enhancements.
Often while gathering requirements, a BA will focus on the customer’s short term needs without considering wider-reaching goals, enhancements, and ongoing maintenance.
In order to use generic modelling techniques, we need to include as much information as possible in our BRDs and use it to design a system that will be more robust, adaptable, and easier to work with and use in the future.
But wait, I hear you say, customers are all different! In fact, each one demands a completely new implementation from scratch! Well, sure, customers will always tell you that their needs are unique and they do things in unconventional ways, and most of them DO have their quirks.
But at the end of the day financial applications end up as one or more lines in GL, no matter how complex the underlying calculations and logic. Isn’t a version a version? Isn’t a currency a currency? Isn’t a year a year, and a product a product?
Legislation and international business standards drive the types and techniques of financial reporting they are trying to produce, so there is bound to be commonality from one customer to the next, even if they are unaware of it.
The idea is to take this commonality and abstract it using generic modelling concepts, in order to reduce the painful redundancy of starting each development cycle from scratch.
This article focuses on the basic development techniques and disciplines you can use in TM1 design and development that will help you achieve a more generic result.
Benefits of Generic Models
Generic models are characterized by the following beneficial features.
Reusability
Ever feel like you’re writing the same calculation logic over and over again? Well, chances are, you are doing exactly that.
Let’s face it, currency conversion rules, for instance, are always eerily similar each time you do them. Likewise, rules to roll forward opening balances.
And what about cube structures? Have you ever noticed that a Loans module is similar to, say, a Project Capex module? Not exactly the same, but each is a list of repeated payments over time, with various other values calculated from that core structure.
If you build with generic principles, you can easily take your Capex module, copy it, add some measures and adapt the rules to satisfy the requirements of a Loan module. This saves hours of design and development time, and keeps the model consistent and familiar to users.
Adaptability
The more generic a model is, the easier it is to make changes.
For example, if you write generic currency rules for each cube, and even include currency conversion in cubes where the customer has said it is not necessary, it is much easier to support additional currencies if the customer requires them later.
And if you are attempting to take an Agile approach to an implementation, being able to change or update a design quickly, and have development respond, is one of the most valuable abilities you can have.
Maintainability
If a model is designed using generic techniques, it is built from the ground up with maintainability in mind. Your goal here is to allow an administrative user to adapt model behaviour without requiring advanced development skills.
Any rules or processes should remain unchanged, with only the inputs to their calculation logic — be those lookup cubes, attributes, or process parameters — requiring update. This helps the customer maintain their own application, without feeling overly reliant on the original consultants who implemented it.
Deployability
Often you’ll want to change the behaviour of a model from development to staging to production. Generic models only require a data change to update their behaviour, so are much easier to maintain in a multi-tiered deployment scenario.
Reduced Risk
When you reuse the same structures and techniques instead of making code changes to adapt a model’s behaviour, you’re inherently reducing the risk of introducing new bugs into the system. To some extent this also alleviates testing requirements, as you only need to test the reusable portion of the module once.
Downside of Generic Models
Speed/Efficiency
Writing rules or processes in a generic way will inevitably add some degree of overhead to your calculations. This is unavoidable, but can be mitigated with various strategies and intelligent design.
Readability & Handover
Often generic rules and TI processes involve more complex code, with frequent lookups and if statements that can confuse developers who might be new to the project.
Likewise, if a customer wants to hire an in-house developer to maintain the model you’ve built for them, they may have some difficulty understand what was done and why in the original design.
This is why it is important that the code is formatted well and commented with meaningful explanations.
How to Build Generic Models
When all is said and done, building models in a generic way is really just a set of disciplines. You need to discard some of your old habits and begin to think generically with every rule and TI you write!
Use lookup cubes and attributes
Hard-coding is the enemy of generic models. If you have a literal string in your rules or TI, you better be sure the thing that string represents is never going to change!
For instance, imagine you are writing a rule that copies the closing balance of the previous year to the current year. Your first thought might be to write a rule like this:
['Opening Bal', '2014'] = N: DB('This Cube', ...,
'YTD Dec',
'2013',
!This Cube Measure
);
Of course this would work, but why limit it to one year? Use an attribute so you don’t have to write the rule again for next year, like so:
['Opening Bal'] = N: DB('This Cube', ...,
'YTD Dec',
ATTRS('Year Dim', !Year Dim, 'Previous Year'),
!This Cube Measure
);
Looks pretty generic, now. But what if you wanted to take this model and deploy it in Australia? The fiscal year starts in July in Australia, so using ‘YTD Dec’ isn’t going to cut it. Assuming you’re using consolidations to tally up your YTD figures, you can restructure the dimension easily enough, but you need to draw your opening balance from YTD Jun.
Again, we can use a lookup to help:
['Opening Bal'] = N: DB('This Cube', ...,
DB('Lookup Cube', !Year Dim, 'Fiscal Year End'),
ATTRS('Year Dim', !Year Dim, 'Previous Year'),
!This Cube Measure
);
You could take these ideas even further. If you want to explore more specific techniques for supporting flexible time dimensions, check out our previous article “Flow’s Date Lookup cube – Back to the Future!” and its sequel, “Back to the Future, Part II“.
Never depend on a particular structure in code
The problem above arises because we have assumed that our YTD values will be structured in a certain way. To some extent, you can avoid assuming a few fundamentals about your design as you code rules and TI, but you can certainly minimize them.
For instance, what if, instead of changing the structure when we want to set a different end of fiscal year month, we decided to name our month elements generically? If we simply called our months, ‘M00’, ‘M01’, ‘M02’, etc, up to ‘M12’, would we have a more generic result?
Well, yes, we could directly reference ‘M12’ in our opening balance rule, which would be attached to ‘M00’. This would mean we wouldn’t need to adjust our YTD consolidations to accommodate a different fiscal year start month.
Use aliases as display labels
However, the above solution is a little aesthetically ugly and not particularly intuitive!
To solve this, we could add aliases to each of these elements to make the display names fit in with our fiscal year period. When deploying in Australia, we could simply name our ‘M01’ element ‘Jul’ to update the behaviour, and remove the need for the costly lookups. In this way, our consolidations could remain static, and would need to be changed to deploy to a different region.
You can apply this technique to many other dimensions, where you substitute an arbitrary code for the primary element name and use aliases to determine the display value. This can make models that were appropriate for one client more transferable to another, and makes your development more agile should a customer change their naming preferences.
Just make sure you save all your subsets with the display alias turned on, and use those subsets in all your important views!
Use standard time dimensions
There has been much discussion about standard time dimensions in the TM1 community, and it seems not everyone agrees. This is just a matter of emphasis. Some place more emphasis on the browsability of cubes and views, while others seek a more flexible and maintainable approach.
Whichever time dimension structure you choose, it is of great benefit to standardize these across your entire module. Even if your users would like to vary the form in which they input data, you can standardize reporting cubes to ensure users get a consistent view.
Check out our previous article “An Item-based Approach to TM1 Model Design” for more information on standardizing reporting cubes across the entire model.
Use a common dimension order
Likewise, it is preferable to keep the order of dimensions as standard as possible. Some developers like to optimize each cube individually by tweaking the dimension order, but in the age of large amounts of available RAM, I believe it is much more preferable to have a predictable dimension order.
This cuts down development time and removes the need for developers to be constantly opening up cubes or using the DB formula generator to ensure the dimension order is correct. It also makes rules much more readable and assist handover to new developers or on-site admins.
Use parameters & global variables to define the behaviour of TI processes
TI processes are generally purpose-built, especially those generated with the wizard. But if you put in a bit of extra time to write these processes generically, you can often use them on future jobs and will save time overall.
Have a look at the our articles “Array Types in Turbo Integrator” and “Returning values from Turbo Integrator processes” for techniques and tricks to make processes work in more generic ways.
Use dynamic (MDX) subsets and saved subsets effectively
Well-designed dynamic subsets are a great way to ensure changes in your element names or dimension structures will have a minimal impact on saves views and the reports that are based upon them.
Likewise, saved subsets can be utilized to set values such as current month and year. This way, all you have to do is update the named subset, and all the reports and views based on it will reflect the change.
Try to avoid unnamed subsets as much as possible, as these will just lead to confusion and errors down the road.
Create dynamic reports
This is probably a whole article in itself, but when you are writing Excel-based reports, it’s very easy to create them in such a way that they will break if underlying structures or names change.
Create named lists with SUBNM formulae to ensure rows and columns do not get out of sync. Use dynamic paging techniques to display small subsets of data that the user can scroll through. And finally, judicious use of active forms (yes judicious, as Active Forms can become very cumbersome very quickly if you overuse them!) can keep your reports and templates dynamic and responsive.
There are many other tricks you can use, but the main point is, think through the impact of changes to the underlying model and try to develop strategies to help your reports survive the turmoil!
Conclusion
This article has only scratched the surface of the various ways you can create more generic models, just by adopting a few habits and disciplines in your modelling work.
Sure, there is a bit of extra work up front, but the pay-off is huge, and increases exponentially over time! Each implementation, you’ll add to your bag of tricks, and this will leave you with more time to attend to the finer details and give your customer a higher degree of satisfaction.