Sometimes something so simple….

Recently I was having a tough time using EPM Automate to update a substitution variable. This member name had spaces and I needed to then utilize that variable in a calculation. It did not appear to be documented in the guide so I thought I would share my solution.

I needed to set the value of a subvar to “Dyn M2 Fcst”. This was an existing piece of metadata and I did not have the luxury of changing the name.

The first time I ran EPM Automate my command looked like:

epmautomate setsubstvars ALL “AutoReportScen=Dyn M2 FCST”

This updated the variable in PBCS and I thought I was done. When I tried to use it in a calc script, of course, it did not work because Essbase thought my member name was “Dyn”.

I then tried :

epmautomate setsubstvars ALL AutoReportScen=”Dyn M2 FCST”

Again it worked successfully, but the variable displayed in PBCS as:

I was still unable to utilize the variable for anything in the application.

After a few different combinations, I finally found the correct one.

epmautomate setsubstvars ALL “AutoReportScen=””Dyn M2 FCST”””

That is correct I have 3 sets of quotation marks. Two are around the variable value and one set around the complete variable and value combination.

Here is how it looks in PBCS:

Now that I had the quotes around the member name everything downstream worked great!

Here is what the command looked like:

I hope this helps and saves you headaches!!