The new built-in Management Reporting module is amazing. It is fast, intuitive, and the member selector is far superior to other parts of PBCS. However, all of that comes with one downside that is not immediately obvious. Here is the scenario: you are building a report and realize that you need to create a new member to add to the report. You create the member, refresh the database, and then go back to the report and attempt to add the member. It is then, that you realize that the member is not there. You try refreshing the database again, but no matter what it will not show up in the member selector. Frustrating…
Example
I created a test report with my Data Source dimension in the columns and added a member. I then saved the report and went back to the dimension editor and attempted to add the member. Here’s the member selector before:
Now I’ve added my member:
Then I refresh and we would think the member would show up:
So let’s try to add the member:
As we can see, no member. Until we completely log out of the system and log back in, the member will not show up. Once this is done, your new member should be available in the member selector in Management Reporting:
Final Thoughts
The question is of course why… We’ve tried testing this on different applications both in classic pods and newer OCI pods and the results have mostly been consistent. I say mostly because we’ve observed a few differences. First, the issue appears to only exist when the dimension is in the grid rather than the POV. I was able to see the newly added member just fine when it was in the POV. Second, in some instances logging off and back on fixes the issue. In other instances we had to log off and completely close our browser and start from scratch…losing all of our tabs in the process. In even another test, we found that if you logged into your same account using Chrome and then tried another browser like Firefox, the member still didn’t appear until we logged out. Once we logged out and then logged in from Chrome…it appeared in Firefox without logging out. With all of that, I assume the issue has to be something about server-side session caching…but that’s a total guess. If you encounter this issue, just log out and back in and hopefully you will be off and running again!