Member Trees
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What are Member Trees?
Within a dimension, members can form what are known as member trees. It’s possible to include several trees within a single dimension (with certain restrictions as detailed in "Who Establishes Member Trees"). For instance, within a Department Dimension, there could be trees categorized by geographic region and by business area.
A single member may belong to multiple trees. For example, "Osaka Branch Corporate Sales Department" might fall under "Osaka Branch" in a region-based tree and under "Corporate Business Division" in a business area-based tree.
There’s no limit to how deep a member tree can be. Furthermore, there’s no requirement for a uniform number of levels within a single member tree.
Who Establishes Member Trees?
Deciding the number of trees within a dimension is a task for the designer. The number of root members (the highest-level members) created by the designer determines the number of member trees. However, there are exceptions:
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Member trees for dimensions like Scenario, Relative Periods, Views, and Fiscal Year are automatically created. Designers have no capability to add to these.
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For the Change Account Dimension, root members are predefined by system specifications. Therefore, designers cannot add new member trees.
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Designers may leave decisions about tree structures to administrators. If a dimension’s design is completed without any root members, administrators can then register any root members at their discretion.
Applications of Member Trees
Member trees serve two primary functions:
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Aggregative calculations
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Grouping members
(1) Aggregative Calculations
Numerical data is aggregated according to the structure of the member trees.
(2) Grouping of Members
Within the Account Dimension, parent members can be used not for holding values but for grouping several members together. In such cases, "None" should be specified as the data type for these parent members (accounts), preventing any aggregative calculations from being performed on the parent member.
Rules for Member Trees
Setting up member trees requires adherence to certain rules. Trees that do not comply with these rules cannot be established.
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There must be no loops in the parent-child relationships of members.
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Leaf members cannot have child members (A "Leaf member" refers to members for which the "Leaf Division" property is set to "Leaf").
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Generally, the same member cannot be placed in multiple locations under the same parent member. However, in the Account Dimension, if the data type of the latter member is “None”, then the same member can be placed in multiple locations under it (since account members with a "None" data type are used solely for grouping purposes).
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The combinations of parent and child member types must satisfy certain criteria. Specifically:
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If the parent and child member types differ, their combination must respect the hierarchy of member types, which is: System Reserved > Template > User-Defined.
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If multiple child members are directly under the same parent member, all those child members must be of the same member type.
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(This ensures that within a member tree, system reserved members, template members, and user-defined members are organized in orderly layers from top to bottom, clarifying the demarcation of responsibilities between designers and administrators.)
In the Account Dimension, there are further restrictions beyond the above:
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The data types of parent and child members must, as a rule, be the same. Exceptionally, if the data type of the parent member is “None”, then any data type for the child member is acceptable.