Hoping the Editable table expert @Ed Hayman can see this and potentially answer.  we had an issue pop up, where while we the admins were doing a promotion from stage to prod, and some of our users were in an editable table, and during that promotion the data that the users were inputting in the editable table were lost.  Since that point we have been very careful on when promoting to production as we don't want the instance to happen again where a lot of updates were lost on the editable table.  The question I have and would like a better understanding of is, since editable table updates are done in production, how does the data that is being updated eventually get into our dev/staging instances.  What best practices are there for promoting data from dev/stage to production that won't impact users if they are working on editable tables.  WE only had one instance that we know about where data was lost, but since that point we are hesistant in doing promotions during the day, because we don't want it to happen again, but sometimes promotions need to occur during the day, so we want to understand the best practices of editable tables and how the data moves from one environment to the other when the data is being updated in production? Thanks.

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Luis Dinis
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Luis, 

End Users access an editable table from the reporting surface.  Changes to an editable table must be "saved" to store them in the underlying database.  The information displayed in the editable table report component can be impacted by changes to the report itself.  If an action occurs that forces the report to "refresh", then any changes in the Editable Table report that weren't saved will be lost.  This can occur in three situations: 

1) End User refreshes the report via the browser  

2) End User is in Production environment and a promote from Stage to Prod occurs

3) End User is in Development environment (requires AccessDev permission which is needed to Promote from reporting surface) and a Dev calc build completes

We have a story in the product backlog to determine how we might prevent the second and third issue.  

For completeness, here are a few key points about editable tables and the cost model.  First, editable tables exist in a MySQL database outside of the cost model.  As such, information in an editable table is independent of the Time Period and Environment selected in the report UI.  Only data in the transform tables, model and calculated metrics are time period aware and follow the Dev/Stage/Promotion process.   To get the editable table information to the cost model requires publishing to a transform table.  Three methods are available: 1) Admin manually updates in data pipeline; 2) End User with permissions and in Dev environment publishes from the reporting surface; and 3) Recurring Scheduler is configured to run and publish on a regular basis.  

For more information, please refer to the section, "Publishing editable tables to the cost model" in the Consolidated Editable Tables deck I provide visuals on how information in an editable table is shared with the cost model. 

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Ed Hayman
Sr. Director, Product Management for IBM Apptio product line
IBM
Bellevue WA
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The way I understand it, the promotion is only required if you have created a transform off the Editable Table behind the report. That allows us to configure when (=what period) the change will be effective. Otherwise it will change it for any period. If we have a transform, the change will be effective only in the period the policy we set up dictates (current month, ...)

We tried scheduling the promotions daily, or even multiple times a day. Naturally, the changes in the transform will only apply once the promotion to PRD has finished.

For us, this was important to ensure changes are controlled, @Luis Dinis.