EPM documentation – The little things mean a lot

The problem

If you’ve ever needed to send a link to a particular subject within the Essbase Technical Reference, henceforth called Tech Ref ‘cos I am lazy), you may have had a frustrating experience.  Why?

Copying and pasting of said links don’t work

What do I mean?  Watch and (not) marvel.

Filter MDX function documentation

Yr. obt. svt.’s attempt to copy and paste

The copy

The paste

The url copied is http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E57185_01/epm.1112/essbase_tech_ref/frameset.htm?launch.html.  That ain’t right.

Alas and alack

We’re right back where we started from, as you can see.

Getting round this

I whined (whinged for you Commonwealth readers) about this to the EPM Information Development team and they, perhaps in an effort get me to shut up or perhaps in an effort to help the general EPM community out – I prefer to think of the latter but the former is likely the case – showed me how to get to the right place.

It’s just this little chromium switch

Instead of copying the frame url, instead look at the frame’s information.  Here are the steps in Firefox.

Here’s looking at you, kid

Grab it and go

This copy is going to result in the url http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E57185_01/epm.1112/essbase_tech_ref/mdx_filter.html.  Could this be right?

Oh yes it is

Isn’t that nice?

So is this important?

If you share links from EPM documentation, yes, absolutely.  I know it seems trivial but I think each and every one of we Essbase Hackers have been frustrated by this.  

Again, my thanks to the great people at the EPM documentation team for showing how this works.  If you’re not taking advantage of their offerings beyond the base documentation page, you really ought to.

Here they are on YouTube, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  You can’t say they aren’t trying to reach out to us.   

Be seeing you.