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Ambiguous Element Name TM1 Rule Error – Quick Fix

I recently opened a rule and made a very minor change, then went to save it and got a really odd error that had nothing to do with the changes I had made to the rule. The error said “Error: Element name ambiguous ‘Current Year'”. This seemed rather odd as had not made any changes that had anything to do with time.

Then I remembered that I had added an alias onto the Year dimension that can be set with ‘Current Year’ or ‘Prior Year’ or whatever and obviously, as an alias needs to be unique, was now causing a conflict with the element referred to in the rule as ‘Current Year’.

Resolution to the Ambiguous Element Rule Error – Type 1

To resolve the mysterious “element name ambiguous” error? Well, that involved stating in the rule which ‘Current Year’ I wanted to work with. I read up on it and found that I need to insert the dimension name in front of the element name in the syntax [dimension:’element’].

Unfortunately, that did not work, no matter what I did. The rule that works says:

['No Year', 'No Month', 'System Assumptions Elements':'Current Year', 'String']

What was not clear from other posts on the internet regarding the ambiguous rule error was that I needed to enclose the dimension name in single inverted commas as well.

So make sure when you fully resolve an element in a rule and you are manually typing the dimension name, you include single inverted commas around the dimension name.

Element Starting with Number, Hyphen or Space – Type 2

There is a second ambiguous rule error as well. This occurs when the element referred to in a rule starts with a number, hyphen or space, then you might get the ambiguous rule error as well. To overcome this you need to either you a DB function or refer to a character based alias of the ID.

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John Vaughan

John Vaughan

John is a CPA, MBA and has been a Performance Management consultant for over 25 years. He is the founder of ExploringTM1 and highly regarded for his experience combining financial management with corporate planning, reporting and analysis. He lives in Sydney with his wife, two of his three children, their cat, Freckles, a bunch of chooks and some fish. John is a sports nut, who played rugby until he was 40, started playing football at 54 and loves being outdoors.

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