Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Some time back I answered a question on BOB that asked:

How can I copy a context?

There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this. In a semi-complex universe you might have a bunch of snowflake tables and a series of fact tables. After building the first context, the second (third, fourth…) are essentially the same but with a different fact table. As far as I know there is no way to copy / paste a context, but there is a fairly simple way to source a new context from an existing one. Here’s what I do:

1. Create the first context
2. After saving the first context, make sure List Mode is activated (it will be on by default if this is the first context in the universe)
3. Click (not double-click) the first context to highlight it; this will select all of the joins that you included in that first context
4. With the CTRL key and your mouse, deselect joins to the first fact and add (select) joins to the second fact; when you are done you will have all of the joins that were created in the first context except for the fact table joins
5. Click the “Add Context” button on the toolbar, or make the equivalent selection from the menu

When you’re done, you will have created a second context based on the first context, even if you cannot copy and paste a context definition. It works very well. 🙂

I have a universe for my current project that has 22 extremely similar contexts. There is only one table that is different from one context to the next, and each context contains a large number of joins. It would have been a real nightmare to try to create each context manually (and I suspect prone to error). Using this technique made the context creation step very easy. 😎

Related Links

• Topic on BOB where I originally answered this question