Hide the User Variable Prompt on a Business Rule

Recently I have been using many User Variables with Hyperion Planning. The greatest benefit I have seen is using a User Variable in the row and allowing users to dynamically select the value as if it were in the point of view. One limitation I noticed was that you could not use that User Variable in a Business Rule as the members are still in the row. Fortunately, a workaround allows you to pass a User Variable value from Planning into a Business Rule. Below we will walk through an example of how to accomplish this.

For this example, we are going to make a User Variable called “userLocation”. You will need to make sure this does not match the name of any Substitution Variable in the environment.

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Next, you will need to create a Calculation Manager Variable that is a “Member” type. Set the default value to the name of your user variable preceded with an ampersand (&).

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Finally, we need to set up a business rule to use this variable and hide the prompt. Create your business rule using the Calculation Manager Variable as you would any single member variable. Then on the bottom of the business rule select the variable tab. In the value column for the Calculation Manager Variable we are working on, enter the user variable preceded with “&”. Check the box for “Use as Override Value” and “Is Hidden”. This will now work as if it were a variable in the point of view.