Ability to comment and make notes
Dear Quantrix staff,
a few of my former SAP BI customers to which I haven given consulting for the design of planning applications running in SAP Netweaver BI had the following request:
They intended to make notes, comments to nearly all objects or levels of a plan (a matrix) you can imagine (similar the way they did it in an EXCEL sheet before they implemented SAP BI). If you now believe that this is no problem for Quantrix and that you already can do this, then just wait a second (or two 
)
Nearly all of these customers (4 big ones, 1 medium sized company) intended to comment not only on level of a matrix, but also inside the different element of a matrix. They intended to comment either
– on the level of one individual cell
– on the level of one or more complete row
– on the level of one or more complete columns
– on the level of a specific dimension (customer (one specific or all), product and so on)
And of course each user who submitted a plan should be able to do this. The most impressive or challenging request was, that it should be possible after consolidation of all local budgets also to consolidate these notes in one central note sheet. All notes belonging to certain sheets, all notes belonging to a certain dimension or a subset (value) of this dimension and so on…
I know, this is a nightmare of a request, but I learned the hard way that people really needed this possibility to comment and to consolidate these comments quickly. The solution we had in SAP Netweaver BI? Well, actually there was the ability to comment on really all of these levels… but the consolidation of all these comments was not possible and the way it worked was really…, well, buggy. Therefore we always developed individual solutions…
Any plans from your side to offer something like this in future?
Best regards,
JS
Hi, I’ve written a few Quantrix plug-ins so perhaps I can help:
A user can add notes to cells, items, and categories and the notes can be obtained via the Quantrix API. So it sounds like you need a plug-in which pulls out all or some notes and formats these into a report – fairly straightforward to write.
[A note to Quantrix API developers: It appears there is an API inconsistency here. For items and categories, unlike cells, there is no getNote() function — one must call getProperty(“note”) instead.]