EPMSxSW

Have you ever felt this way?  Hand on your head, eyes down, completely stumped?  My son and I had a zoo date a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t help but snap this picture.  I swear this has been me for the last 3 weeks.  We had an issue with a client in their Workforce Planning application.  When the user typed in the hire date or leave date, it would save to the previous day.  For example, we would type in 4.1.16, hit SAVE, and the number would pop up as 3.31.16 (no April’s fools. SWEAR!).  We checked everything, from the member properties, to the servers, to the location of the servers, to the date/time stamp on the servers to the SQL tables.  NOTHING made sense.  What was even more bizarre, this occurred only in their prod environment.  TEST worked just fine, and it was for all users.

We finally realized that something was wonky in the Planning Properties and the wonkiness (totally a word) was the word NULL.  <TimeZone>null</TimeZone>

Here’s what we did:

• Launch Shared Services Console.
• On the View pane, expand the Application Groups node.
• Under Application Groups, expand Foundation, and then Deployment Metadata.
• On the Artifact List tab, expand Shared Services Registry, then Foundation Services, and then Shared Services.
• Select the Properties artifact; then, right-click and select Export for Edit.
• In the File Download dialog box, save the Properties artifact to the desired

We then opened the file and searched for <TimeZone>null</TimeZone>  and removed the word “null”.

If no changes are made to the file, what happens is the user preference table for time zone puts in the word “null” instead of nothing as intended.  If we remove the word “null”,  it loads properly and everything works correctly. After we verified <TimeZone></TimeZone> in all locations, we saved the file and reimported it back into the Artifacts List.

Once the user logged off and back on, the changes took effect.  We typed in 4.1.16, hit SAVE and it saved to Essbase as 4.1.16.

This was seriously the first time I ever saw this issue.  You may never see it, but if you do, it’s a pretty easy fix, and hopefully this will save you 3 of looking like that poor sad gorilla!

~Sum