Trend AB Tool not Initializing

[cjaneczko]

I have only three fields; Index (V_WString), Date(Date), QTY(Double) and the tool is throwing errors. Not sure what I am doing wrong with this. I have tried playing with the dates and number of periods. There are 14 months of data on the input ranging from Oct 1 2023 back to August 1 2022.

[OllieClarke]

Hi @cjaneczko I think the issue is with your date field

Per the documentation you need at least 1 year + the specified periods before the start date in your data set, so in your case your data should start at or before July 2022 (3 months before Oct 2022). If you change the number of periods to 2 does it work?

[cjaneczko]

@OllieClarke Added more time periods going back 20 months and selected 3 as the trend. There is a new error. Added a browse tool and it looks like I have enough months and the months are consecutive with no gaps. Says I am missing X values but I am not seeing where the missing values are.

[OllieClarke]

@cjaneczko Do you have any nulls in your QTY field?

[OllieClarke]

@cjaneczko Also, if you’re looking monthly, what happens if you choose the start date as 2023-10-01?

[cjaneczko]

There doesnt appear to be any Nulls.

[OllieClarke]

Hi @cjaneczko sorry, just seen your reply. 

If you click the header of Qty in the browse tool configuration pane, then you'll get full statistics which will say if there are any nulls at all in that column.

[cjaneczko]

There were no Nulls in the QTY field when I checked the Browse detail. I ended up just creating the calculation manually through a macro. Due to the large number of 0's across months it yields a lot of null calculations (division by 0). I am wondering if this is why the AB Trend is throwing an error. 

[OllieClarke · Accepted solution]

@cjaneczko That could be the case. I found when testing with the example workflows that if multiple columns had 0s in, then the Tool threw an error, but with just one zeroey column it didn't even with 90% 0.
Somewhere between 90 and 92% 0 though the error did begin to show though

[cjaneczko]

Going to mark this as solved, as I think we pinpointed the cause for the error.