Custom units of measurement
Dataflow supports a wide range of units of measurement; however, if the unit you need is not available or has different parameters, you can create custom units. To create a custom unit, open the Variables tab and click on the cell in the Unit Type column. Click on the arrow and the list of available units will be displayed. The Custom option is at the top of the list.
When you select the Custom option, the Unit Definition window will be displayed.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Is Currency Unit | Indicates whether the selected unit is a monetary unit. |
| Timescale Consolidation Method | The method used to convert values into different periodicities. |
| Aggregation Method | The calculation method used to consolidate values. |
Dataflow has three default unit systems: Imperial, Metric and Continental. The Imperial system is used as reference in all calculations. The Imperial Settings section contains factors for conversion between different scales. The Medium scale is the basic and other scales are defined against it.
The Display Label section contains labels for the unit at different scales. Dataflow uses M for thousand and MM for million, so, for example, labels for oil volume are bbl, MSTB and MMSTB.
The image below shows conversion factors for a unit with different values for the three scales. Since the Medium scale is the basic, 1 is set as the medium-scale conversion factor. One unit on the Medium scale contains 1000 individual units, thus the small-scale conversion factor is 1000. And one unit on the Large scale contains 1000 units on the Medium scale, thus the large-scale conversion factor is 0.001.
The image below shows an example of oil volume conversion from the Imperial unit system into Metric.
One thousand barrels is 0.1589873 m3, thus the conversion factor for the medium scale is 0.1589873. Then, this conversion factor is multiplied by small- and large-scale factors specified in the Imperial unit system (1000 and 0.001 respectively), which gives coefficients of 158.9873 and 0.0001589873. The labels for the unit are: m3, E3m3 and E6m3.
Important: Only simple multiplicative conversions can be used, i.e. you cannot set up conversions such as Celsius to Fahrenheit.