Hello Folks,

I know that the inability to change table/object names is something that all customers want, but what about being able to change field names?

A major improvement would be that field, table, object names and such would simply be a form of meta-data on top of an underlying unique code.  This way we could change these names and it would dynamically change in all formulas, references, etc.

Does anyone know if Apptio engineering are busy with a better structural solution?

Sandor Welfing

Raboboank

@Sandor Welfing.  This is an interesting topic and I would be eager to hear from Apptio regarding this update.  Our work around is to modify our data set prior to upload via a PowerShell script as apart of our data ingestion strategy.  If you're interested you can find this strategy outlined here, Apptio Data Ingestion.

@Sandor Welfing I'm curious, why do you need to do this? Could you give an example? We do have some field names that are syntactically redundant (we used to use Activity Codes data but now we user Sub-Towers but all our transform keys still use the field called Activity Code even though it contains Sub-Tower codes) so it would be nice to change the name and have it persisted through all the formulas. aside from tidying is there a situation?

@Robert Schneider This sounds like you have varied input fields to map to a single field in Apptio, wouldn't this still be the case if you could change the field name in Apptio? Wouldn't this simply push the mapping issue into Apptio?

My specific use case is we have data that has a column heading as MMM-YY for the total line item cost.  Since this header is dynamic we must modify the data set prior to upload every month to some generic header for Apptio to map it correctly.  The use of equations in the mapping relationships could resolve my need to modify our raw data prior to uploads.  My goal is to have all of our raw data uploaded automatically from our source systems without modifications.  

Hi Robert - for your specific use case - I would suggest that you try the following:

1. For R12

Use the Unpivot step on the dataset and in the Unpivot by section, add all the columns other than the MMM-YY columns. This will create rows with the column headers into a column called "Collapse Column" and put the numeric value into a column called "Collapse Value".

So for example: So a table like the one below, 

____________________________________________

| Cost Center | Acct Code | JAN-17 | FEB-17 | MAR-17 |

|  8099           |  70156       |       100 |       200 |         300 |

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

you can unpivot by Cost Center and Acct Code and then it becomes like this:

| Cost Center | Acct Code | Collapse Column | Collapse Value |

|  8099           |  70156       |   JAN-17               |                   100 |

|  8099           |  70156       |   FEB-17               |                   200 |

|  8099           |  70156       |   MAR-17              |                   300 |

Then it no longer matters about the header column changing every year.

Let me know if that works for your use case.

Regards,

Sanjay Valiyaveettil

Hello Sanjay,

Thank you!  We are currently migrating to R12 and will give this a try.

By the way @Robert Schneider - you can totally do this in R11 (I forgot to mention it in my response).

Goto the dataset and for each column other than the MMM-YY columns, check the "Collapse Grid By" checkbox and this will get you the same result. 

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Sanjay Valiyaveettil

Well, we have quite a few formulas and if the field name changes in the underlying tables it would be needed to revisit all those formulas again to change the field names used.  I would rather that this was done dynamically.

Feel your pain - I have to create a document that has all logic listed so I can search for all touch points to ensure nothing gets messed up upstream/downstream when it comes time to make those type of changes. I'm sure Apptio will evolve to that point sometime in the future (re dynamic changes) because it's always getting better and better.

Somewhat related to this, how would I find what fields of what tables am I using in what formulas?

After a while, we not only lost track of field names (IT Resource Tower Name, Tower-Name, ITRT Name... any possible variation by now), but also WHERE to find it.

I am sure I am not the only one to have this issue.

You are not the only one that has this issue.  Just recently a colleague wanted to improve some column names and ran into other objects that referenced those fields unexpectedly.  It would be far far better if you could change field names in tables and objects without any impact.  Behind the scenes formulas would contain the unique ID of the field and just show the namelabel based on a meta-data lookup of that field or column.

This approach should be used for Table names and Object names as well.  It is crazy that Apptio still uses names of objects as unique identifiers...

Indeed Sandor. We are finding subtle cyclic references because it's hard for us to track tables that end up calling each other for data. Apptio prevents us from creating the recursion, but it's still hard to know what formula step on what table is calling what other column on another.

In terms of development support Apptio is still poor. This approach might be OK for an Excel spreadsheet where you might have a few macros or VB calls, but not for a complex system with hundreds of tables.