PPS Planning – Force Cancel Check Out Functionality

You’ve been badgering away at a PerformancePoint Server Planning Model all day, updating objects, writing complex MDX scope statements to satisfy obscure business requirements and you’ve only got to add a new view to the time dimension before you can deploy and start testing when you find that your colleague – the one that had to leave early to pick up the kids – has it checked out !

What’s the problem?  Surely you can undo the checkout from the admin console like you can in VSS Admin?  Okay, he could lose his isolated changes but you’ve been at the whole model for the whole day.  Well, there is some good news and some rather irritating bad news !

There is indeed an admin level undo checkout feature that allows you to unlock the objects so you can check them out to you, and this feature is easily found in the Planning Admin Console.

It’s one drawback is the fact it forces you to undo the checkout for ALL checked out objects in an application.  There is no ability to select an individual planning object !

In my scenario it was not that much of a big deal as I could check all my objects in and then force the undo checkout on the only remaining checked out object but I’m not always going to be that lucky.

On the face of it, it would be little effort for the Redmond gang to add that additional functionality to the Admin Console.  You can obviously check-in/check-out individual objects from within the Business Modeler so the stored procs already exist, right?  hmm, actually, that gives me an idea …