How can I refer to a previous row in the current one? In Excel this is dead easy...

Hi Guillermo, I've moved this over to the Cost Transparency space to see if some of the experts there have a response.

Apptio stores rows using a relational database, which by definition does not guarantee any particular row order.

Only one exception I'm aware of: a Tablematch() function's target table executes its logic in the order of the originally uploaded table rows. (So for instance a default fallback value row must be the last row in the table.)

But since all other tables are order-independent, there's no built-in function to read in the value from a previous row, as we would with a spreadsheet (which has a static row order).

Gulcin, our Apptio therapist advised to do this in a more "Apptian" way which worked beautifully.

Thanks  c-GKucukkirca@apptio.com">Gulcin Kucukkirca !

Apptio Therapist - love it   How did y'all get it to work?  #Curious

I went back to the Transform and to my dismay it was working only partially. I took up the topic with c-GKucukkirca@apptio.com">Gulcin Kucukkirca and we reviewed what we did: the transform needs a table with all possible combinations so that it can do a LookupEx and unfold the lines properly.

We have that working in the first part of the transform, but there we are dealing with numbers up to 60 to a hundred or two. This is manageable.
 

For the second part of the exercise, creating a list of ESX hosts we need for next year's budget based on the list of planned VMs, the numbers are in the thousands range. This is impractical.

c-GKucukkirca@apptio.com">Gulcin Kucukkirca eventually recommended that we do that last step in Excel (sniff).

In any case I learned a lot about the "Apptian way".