Some Thoughts on Prophet (Part 1)

Sharing is always a good thing. By sharing the knowledge I have, apart from providing others some ideas on how to improve their daily work or resolve the problems they encounter, I can still benefit from the sharing. Through writing posts in LinkedIn, I strengthen my knowledge and concepts, as well as gaining some inputs and view from other connections in my network.

For better records, I also put down my sharing under this blog, so that it is easier to be referred if needed.  

Thought (1): Debugger License - Get it if you have the budget

If you have additional budgets on Prophet licensing, I would suggest to get the Debugger license (yes, it needs a separate licensing). When you encounter errors in your Prophet runs, AND Prophet cannot display its run log (i.e. errors in both doing runs and displaying run logs at the same time) , Debugger will save your life (otherwise it may very tough to find out what the issue is).

If I can suggest enhancements on Prophet, I think it will be great if we can allow t-dependent calculation for TEXT variable as well. At the moment, Prophet doesn't allow t-dependent text variables - which create some hassles especially when we want to change the text values for different calculation loopings (CALC_LOOP).

P/S: We can also use PRINT_TO_FILE to output variables that we want to check into run logs.

Thought (2): No t dependent for text value?

To overcome this limitation, of course there is more than one way to handle it. For example, if the text value is a table name, we can vary the table names within READ_GENERIC_TABLE, under the numeric variable that we want to store the value read from the table.

Another approach I use quite a lot is using an extended formula to read the text value (it's OK to make the public variable within the extended formula to vary by calculation looping). Usually I will use ONE extended formula to read many text variables at the same time (so that can reduce no. of variables).

Of course, if you don't have debugger license, it is not easy to check text the value as it cannot be exported to normal text variable.

Further reading:

• Some Thoughts on Prophet (Part 2)
• Some Thoughts on Prophet (Part 1) (This post)