Drillbridge’s powerful mapping abilities handle most common transformations with ease – stripping a prefix, converting a month into digits, or letting you use the Java language itself to parse a string however you need. Every dimension that gets drilled from is represented as a variable that a Drillbridge administrator can use to build their own expression. For example, if there is a dimension called Years in the cube, and the user drills on a member named FY15, then on the report side of things, there will be a variable referenced as #Years that will have the value of “FY15”. From here it would be typical to use the #removeStarting function to strip off the FY, and perhaps prepend the string “20”, then use that in a database query.

Something interesting happens, however, when the dimension has spaces in it. Let’s say that the dimension name is “Time Periods”. For perhaps obvious reasons, Drillbridge can’t create a variable with a space in it, because it’d look like a variable followed by a string (like #Time Periods). Instead, Drillbridge will replace spaces with underscores for purposes of creating a variable. In this case the variable would be #Time_Periods.

So #Time_Periods is the variable that is used inside the token expression, but what about the name of a token? The name of a token should still be the name of the dimension, using spaces, not underscores.

Consider the following tokenized query:

SELECT *
FROM Transactions
WHERE MONTH(PostDate) IN {{
"name" : "Time Periods",
"expression": "#monthAbbreviationToDigit(#Time_Periods)",
"drillToBottom": "true", "quoteMembers": "false"
}}

As you can see, the name parameter has the space, but the expression uses the underscored version of the variable name. In this case we’re also using the very handy #monthAbbreviationToDigit built-in function that can convert month names like Jan, Feb, and so on to 1, 2, or the proper month number.