Best Practices for Organizing and Naming Objects

While working with many Universes, I’ve noticed that sometimes not enough attention is given to naming objects and the ordering of objects. This in turn may cause confusion with the business users since they are not completely clear on what each of the objects do.

Ordering of objects

When you have objects of the same class grouped together, it makes it much clearer to the business user to view when they see it in a hierarchal form instead of alphabetically. Lets take for example date objects. We have a year, quarter, month, and day object. The largest increment or grouping should always appear at the top and the most detailed at the bottom. Having this ordering will facilitate drilldowns. If these were sorted alphabetically, a business user would have to do more work in order to come up with a drilldown hierarchy.