Cell Locks
You can lock
input-ready cells against manual changes in planning applications. A locked
cell is a time-limited setting that only applies to the current user session.
Locked cells are displayed with the standard lock symbol
. The user can also undo cell locks.
It can also be a
good idea to lock cells when working with input-ready and inverse formulas
(see
Input-Ready
Queries,
Examples: Inverse
Formulas and
Inverse Formulas at
Runtime).
If disaggregation
is used in a query, locking a cell can help you to fix the values of higher or
lower levels while manually changing other values (see Planning Business Data
Manually and
Disaggregation
(Top-Down-Distribution)).

If you lock cells in an input-ready query for disaggregation, we recommend modeling hierarchical relationships by exclusively using BW hierarchies or subtotals and totals in characteristics in the drilldown. You should not use structure elements defined as hidden “hierarchies” in Query Designer for modeling.
There are two implementations of the cell lock function. These are local cell locks in the query (front-end cell locks) and global cell locks in a Web template (back-end cell locks):
Cell locks are managed exclusively in the BI Java runtime for the current result set. Cell locks remain in effect so long as no significant changes are made to the result set. The back-end system only recognizes cell locks during the server roundtrip and can thus take them into consideration in case of inverse formulas and disaggregation.
Cell locks are managed exclusively in the back-end system for all input-ready queries in the planning application. This makes it possible for a cell that is locked in a query to be displayed as locked in other queries that belong to the planning application and to be treated as such.
For more information about the two cell lock methods, as well as the restrictions and modeling recommendations, see Local Cell Locks in a Query (Front End) and Global Cell Locks in a Planning Application (Back End).