We have a use case for blank separator lines between groups of accounts. (indicated by red lines below) The business wanted these to provide for logical groupings of their accounts seen on the form.
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In order to implement this we have “tricked” a formula row by adding a row label, then spacing out the row label, and leaving the formula blank.
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This is working to achieve a blank separator line on the input forms as seen in the first screenshot above.
However, we came across an issue when migrating the forms from one environment to another using Oracle Hyperion Lifecycle Management (LCM). After importing the form into the new environment, those blank lines are displaying “#error”.
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So I went and checked the definition of the row in the form and found that the word ‘null’ had been placed into the formula. This is not a valid form formula, hence the “#error” being displayed.
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I then went to the Hyperion LCM xml export file, and sure enough, the formulaValue property is exported as “null” instead of blank “”. This must be because we are using Oracle for our relational repository, where when the form is saved since the Formula property is blank, it is being saved with a null value. It was a little surprising though to see LCM inserting null with quotes as the formulaValue.
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Once we identified what was causing the #error to be displayed, it was really fairly simple to fix it. The LCM export is xml (text files), so all we have to do is change that formulaValue property back to blank. The client is using windows Powershell to run their LCM exports, so it was easy to make the choice to construct a rename procedure in Powershell, and incorporate it into the batch. What also made this easy is that there should be NO formulaValue property of a form that is equal to “null”, so I could apply this rule across all forms. (we have multiple forms with these blank lines)
Here is the Powershell script that we used, which is a simple find/replace, to eliminate the “null” from the formulaValue property of all the forms in the LCM export.
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After running this script, the form’s LCM export xml file no longer contains the “null” in the formulaValue property. Now when the form is imported back into the planning environment, we will see a blank line as we developed it.
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