With PBCS and EPBCS you have the possibility to exclude certain members or hierarchies from a form. For example, let’s say you want to have a form with all Descendants of “Gross Profit” but you don’t want Sales because Sales are input in another form, no need to hand pick each hierarchy, select the descendants of “Gross Profit” and exclude “Sales”. Let me show you how to do that.

Setting up a form

The first thing you need to do is to obviously to create the data input form or webform. In our case, we select IDescendants(“Gross Profit”) in rows.

The form will naturally show all hierarchies (Revenue and Cost Of Sales) under of Gross Profit:

Adding an exclusion

Let’s say that we want to exclude “Cost of Sales” from this form. First, you need to select “Add Exclusion” under the first box:

Then you select the members you want to exclude, let’s select IDescendants(“Total Cost of Sales”)

Your form definition is nicely updated:

Now the form shows all rollups except “Total Cost of Sales”

One (little) limitation

When I discovered this feature, I thought it would work like the @REMOVE function in Essbase. I am a huge fan of @REMOVE, I use it all the time in rules. Then I remembered that forms actually execute MDX (or at least, it is what I understand), what it means is that you cannot exclude members in an alternate hierarchy. So for example, let’s imagine that you have some accounts that are entered in another form and for this reason you have an alternate hierarchy with Shared Members, the form will let you select the alternate hierarchy but the result won’t change.

Removing an exclusion

To remove the exclusion, select “Remove Exclusion” in the first selection box:

Yes, it is quite simple, why make it complicated after all?