Concept: Associations and Workday Roles
You can use associations as a way to provide Workday roles to Adaptive Planning users. Associations support Workday core organization assignments and membership.
When you sync users to Adaptive Planning, users don't automatically receive associations. You can set up associations only after your users, dimensions, accounts, levels, and other metadata already exist.
In Adaptive Planning, associations connect users with levels and custom dimensions. You can then use association codes to create access rules for users and groups. When you use associations for access rules, you can update the associations instead of the rules to update user access.
Associations contribute to the 2 Adaptive Planning security structures:
- Level-based security, where level ownership defines user access to data when you don't enable access rules.
- Access rule security, where you can use associations to create flexible and dynamic access rules.
Associations save time and manual effort when you create access rules and when you update level ownership.
Ownership and associations cascade down a hierarchy. Users associated with a parent level or dimension automatically associate with its children. You can't create associations with only the parent in a hierarchy.
Workday Assignable Roles
Within Workday, you can assign Adaptive Planning users to Workday roles for dimensions by customizing the Workday Plan Dimensions Hierarchies Report to include custom report fields for:
- Assignable Role
- Assignable Role Reference ID
- Adaptive Planning System Users for Assignable Role
Each dimension in Workday receives an assignable role and a role reference ID. Each assignable role contains a list of users. Use the reference ID as the association code in Adaptive Planning. We recommend editing the reference ID in Workday to make it human readable before your first import of associations into Adaptive Planning.
Association as Level Ownership
Level ownership grants special privileges for the levels users own in either of the 2 security models. Unlike other associations, you don’t create an association code for level ownership.
Level ownership is required for level-based security structures. Without level ownership, a user can't access sheets, reports, or dashboards.
To use level ownership in access rules, enter a tilde to assign users access to all owned levels.
You can manually select the levels a user owns by editing access in . Level ownership also displays in .
Cost Centers as Levels
If you want to associate a user with a cost center, first include cost center in the Workday report you use as your data source. If the cost center is a level structure, an association must tie to the user in Adaptive Planning.
User Associations with Access Rules
With access rules, you can define specific intersections of data that users or groups can edit or view. The dimensions you secure define the intersection. These dimensions are called secured dimensions. You can secure accounts, levels, and up to three custom dimensions.
Without user associations, you might need to update multiple access rules instead of updating a single association.
Editing Associations
You can edit associations by:
- Uploading a spreadsheet to .
- Loading associations in-bulk with the Planning Association Loader.
- Using the updateAssociations API.
Load User Associations
You can skip manual association edits by using the Planning Association Loader or by importing a spreadsheet to .
The loader enables you to set user associations, including level ownership, for multiple users simultaneously. Before you run the loader, you must:
- Complete user sync.
- Load all of your accounts, dimensions, and levels.
- Make the Assignable Role Reference ID human-readable in the Plan Dimensions Hierarchy Report in Workday.
Delete Association Codes
You can delete association codes by uploading a spreadsheet containing only the codes and names you want to delete to and selecting the
Remove
import option.
You can't delete associations with the Planning Association Loader or the updateAssociations API.
Remove Users from Associations
You can dissociate a user from a dimension or level. Association codes remain even after removing the user.
Remove a user from an association by uploading a spreadsheet without a username in the cell for a dimension value to and selecting the
Update and Append
import option.