more than one dims for measure not supported

[Said Bouzenzana@B.I.]

Dear Jiri,
I've tried to create a form with a measure based on two dimensions (Age and Gender) .
I'm just realizing that the loader supports only a single dim for a formsection type of grid .
So that to say it's seems to be impossible to load data for a measure like Deaths due to malaria (per 100 000 population per year)
by gender and age .

Got error message below :
Internal error when resolving metadata for Form 2: Current data server version supports only 1 additional dimension per grid; metadata contains "GENDER_CODE" and "AGE_CODE"

Could you please give me info about this restriction , and what would be the impact disabling this restriction.

Thanks
Best Regards
Said

[Said Bouzenzana@B.I. (said-bouzenzana)]

After a deeper look at the code , to ensure the functionality to have multiple dims doesn't seem to be a simple disable of that check .This will involve a heavy work on the loader.

[Jiri Dvorak (jiri-dvorak)]

Said, that is absolutely correct - the 1-dimension limit is not just a "restriction", this is what has been developed based on functional requirements of FLUID and early-GHO. We didn't have any need to support more that 1 additional dimension on data entry (it is kind of difficult to show 3-dimensional tables in Web data-entry forms), and we didn't have the budget to develop features that were not in the functional scope of the project.

The code structure allows the code to be extended to support more dimension (this is the part of DynFormsDAO / DynFormsDTO where we handle either LOCATIONS or MEASURE_DIMENSION_...), but, as you correctly observed, the amount of work is not trivial.

If we would put a reasonable upper limit on the number of supported dimension, I'd estimate the effort on 10-15 person-days (with proper testing); if we'd need to support an unlimited number of dimensions, the estimate would be visibly higher (I would have to do some research to figure it out).