Getting started with TM1 Applications (part 1)

TM1 Applications, commonly refereed to as TM1 Contributor, provides a structured workflow to enter data into a TM1 model. Most commonly this is used for Planning and Forecasting applications.

Lets walk through deploying a simple application using the IBM provided sample. Before you can deploy your first TM1 Application you will need an existing model. The model being used should contain a dimension used for the applications approval hierarchy, and at one or more cube that users will enter data into. At least one of the cubes being used for data entry must contain the dimension used for the application approval hierarchy.

These steps assume that we have TM1 installed (including sample models) and the all TM1 services are running.

1 - Browse to the TM1 Applications web portal. In my case this is http://tm1.tm1masters.com:9510/pmpsvc. If this is the first time using the TM1 Applications web portal we will see the following initialization page.

I've configured the Admin Host to point to the system running my TM1 Admin service and selected the Planning Sample model. Note that we must select a single TM1 model on this screen, but we can add other TM1 models for use with TM1 Applications later. Click OK to continue.

2 - Once we are past the initialization page we will be prompted to login. The username and password for the samples are admin\apple. We are assuming the Planning Sample model was left in TM1 native security mode (not configured for CAM security).

3 - After we login we might see the following warnings.

All three of these warnings can be safely ignored for now. If you want to prevent these warning we can update the Planning Sample models tm1s.cfg file.

The value of the ForceReevaluationOfFeedersForFedCellsOnDataChange should be considered carefully as setting ForceReevaluationOfFeedersForFedCellsOnDataChange=T can have a very extreme performance impact. SettinForceReevaluationOfFeedersForFedCellsOnDataChange=T is not required just because you are going to use TM1 Applications or the Performance Modeler client.

Restart the Planning Sample TM1 service if any of these parameters in the tm1s.cfg file are updated.

4 - Launch Performance Modeler by clicking the Performance Modeler icon. If Performance Modeler was not already installed you will be prompted to install.

Performance Modeler is an MSI installation package. The following error has be noted when installing on Windows Server 2008 and 2012.

To work past this error choose to download the PerformanceModeler64.msi file and run it from a command prompt window that was opened with the 'Run as administrator' option.

Performance Modeler client should automatically update itself if the TM1 server installation was updated with a Fixpack. For some reason this only happens when Performance Modeler is launched from the TM1 Application web portal.

5 - Switch to the Application Design view (bottom left of Performance Modeler) and create a new application.

In this example we are creating an approval type application. The approval type is the most commonly used for a planning cycle application. To keep things simple we will name the application Planning Sample. It's worth noting that it's common to have multiple applications using the same TM1 model. We will talk about that in detail later. 

6 - Lets add our approval hierarchy dimension and a cube that users will enter data into. The approval hierarchy dimension used is really just a subset and the contributor cube is really just a view. Expand the dimension folder in the TM1 Objects area, expand the Department dimension, then drag the Default subset to the Approval hierarchy area.

Drag the Budget Input Detailed view from the plan_BudgetPlan cube to the Contributor views area.

7 - Before we deploy the application we should also examine the application properties. In this example we will use cell security to enforcement the application rights. Application rights are used to determine which groups and users can access specifics areas (nodes) in the workflow. Cell security is the modern method of rights enforcement that was introduced in TM1 10.2. The major advantage of cell security over element security is that it lets us deploy multiple application that use the same input cubes. This was a serious limitation in previous versions.

We have also disabled the Cognos Insight options since we ignored the previous warning about the DistributedPlanningDir parameter in the tm1s.cfg file. We can enable this option at a later point if we choose to use Cognos Insight as an alternative to TM1 Application Web.

8 - Before we can use our application we must save and deploy it. Click the save and deploy buttons highlighted in the screenshot.

Assuming the application was defined correctly we should see a message saying it was validated and deployed.

9 - At this point the application has been deployed. We simply need to activate it then we should be able to open it and start examining the workflow. Return to the TM1 Applications web portal and click the refresh button, the application should appear.

Click the activate button highlighted below.

The following warning can be ignored for now. We will discuss the order of dimension at a later time.

10 - We can test opening our application and accessing the workflow view. Click on the application name (Planning Sample) to access the workflow. In the screenshot below all nodes (left side) have been expanded. Although no rights have been assigned to the application nodes we can still see all nodes since we are using the Admin account in the Planning Sample model.

In part 2 we will cover application rights and go into more detail about how TM1 Applications interacts with the TM1 model.