Hi Steve,
I'm assuming that what you've described as your "reporting structure" is the outline of the report you're trying to build. If I understand correctly, it looks like you're working backwards from a specific reporting requirement, and what you are trying to solve at the universe level in IDT should be solved in WebI instead using formulas.
My advice would be to keep things as simple as possible on the universe side: one analysis axis is the country, another the product category, another the group: provide dimensions for each. You can then create variables in WebI which include or exclude specific values of these dimensions according to the rules you've specified.
If what you have in mind is separate universe objects for each line in your report, with an implicit filtering behind them, consider that this will make totaling quantities across countries more complicated -- if that is a requirement -- and the implicit filtering according to different rules in different countries will mean that you are "totaling apples and oranges" if you do try to do so anyway. Therefore you may also wish to create more general purpose objects to provide this flexibility.
If you do go the route of specific universe objects, make sure to build them on separate table aliases or derived tables -- I'd prefer alias tables with equijoin filters, for the sake of performance -- since you can't otherwise filter the same data from the same table at the same time with contradictory filters (where country = 'Italy' and country = 'Spain' doesn't return a particularly interesting result set... )
Hope this helps.
Emily
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