How to: Modify Financial Reporting Annotation Categories

I covered in a previous blog post the new addition of Annotations in HFR/FR in the System 11x EPM release.  When you create or reply to an annotation one has the option to taxonomize the annotation using the category dropdown.  This blog quickly steps you through how to add/remove a category so that the default categories can be augmented or offset.  Please note that you may cause referential damage to your HFR/FR system if you modify a category that is already being used in an existing annotation entry. Be careful or you may cause errors in FR and the annotation report viewer resulting from your modification.

When a user creates or replies to an HFR annotation, out-of-the-box the default category list appears in the drop-down with the options seen below:

In order to modify this list (add/change/remove) on must access the “annotations.properties” configuration file located in [%Hyperion_Home%]productsFoundationworkspacelib. This file also stores logging information related to the annotations but we are concerned only with the categories at this point.

Open the file and location the section for “Categories”. It should be above the logging configuration section. There is a comma-separated list of values that are set by default. At this point, you can add, delete, or modify this list. For testing purposes and the sake of this tutorial I simply appended a new value called “Testing” to the end of the list. Pay attention to follow the structure currently in place before making your change. Notice that there are no spaces between values and that the last value does not contain a trailing comma.

Save the annotations.properties file and close it. At this point, your modifications have taken place but they will not be available in FR or anywhere else in the system for use until you restart the Hyperion Annotation Server windows service. Restart the Windows service and re-open your HFR/FR report. You will now see that your change has been picked up properly.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we quickly located our annotations config file, made a modification, restarted services, and saw the change reflected as we desired. Just as a reminder this operation should only be done by a high-level administrator. Extra care should be taken to run the annotation report from Workspace first to ensure that no existing annotations are using categories that you seek to modify. Doing so may have undesired results and cause headaches. Enjoy.