Time Slicing Definitions

Products

• Clarity PPM On Premise
• Clarity PPM SaaS

Issue/Introduction

What does the information on the Administration > Data Administration > Time Slices page mean or indicate?

Environment

Release: All Supported

Component: Clarity Time Slicing

Resolution

The Administration > Data Administration > Time Slices page shows how data is configured for the Time Slicing job to slice data.  This data is sliced/generated to provide end users with needed resource/project/task/time information across stock portlets and reports.
The fields shown the this page are described below:

ID/Time Slice - The data item being sliced

Rollover Interval - The frequency of how often the data range is shifted. ('Frequency' column) How often data for this request will be rolled over to the next period?

     When rollover occurs, the next unit of data is generated while the date range is kept the same.
     For instance if the date range is two years, with a start month of JAN 2018 and end month of DEC 2020, when rollover occurs, the new date range is FEB 2018 to JAN 2021.

From Date - The start date of the requested data item

Slice Period - The time unit being sliced 

Number of Periods - The number of units being requested starting from the From date.

Item - The data being sliced

Expiration - The date of the next rollover. This date is automatically calculated by based on the Rollover Interval and the From Date. The Expiration Date is initially set when the Time Slice Definition is created or updated, but when the Time Slicing job executes, the Expiration Date is checked and recalculated based on the configuration described below.

Data Warehouse - Indicates if this slice is a DWH fiscal/monthly slice

Last Run Date - denotes when the last time the Time Slicing job completed the slice id request. It is represented by the PRJ_BLB_SLICEREQUESTS.request_completed_date field.

 

Additional Information

Best Practices

• For the Daily Resource Time Definitions with ids 1, 2, 3, 10, and 11, it is recommended to have the From Dates all be the 1st of the month. This is true for the monthly time slice ids, also.
  See also: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/27257

 

• If the goal is to data included for a larger time frame, where rollover does not account for a particular time, expand the duration.

For example, for DWH Fiscal time slices, if the goal is have Jan 2021 be included in future rollovers without having to reslice often, as every month it performs a rollover and JAN 2021 data is not included.

The solution is to set the From Date to start month or years earlier to JAN 2021, e.g

From Date is= 1/1/2019 
Number of periods = desired number of months (to span ~10 years)
Rerun the time slicing job, full Load DWH, Load DWH access rights job.
Run the stock report or custom report.

NOTE: Every time rollover occurs, it will not include the 1st month, i.e. it will rollover to next month.

Since they are fiscal months, these slices do not pose as a potential performance issue.

To review slices that do not appear on the Administration > Data Administration > Time Slices page,
these are internal slices that will not be displayed by design.

In order to view the definition for the internal slices, use the following query:

select id, request_name, from_date, num_periods, to_date,
expiration_date next_rollover, table_name,
request_completed_date, is_synchronous
from prj_blb_slicerequests 
where is_synchronous = 0
order by id