.NET with BI development tips, tricks and experiences.

Been busy creating a Silverlight/SSAS mashup recently to show off their potential when used together to both colleagues and clients. While attempting to build the measure selection/filtering interface I thought it would be pleasant if they were grouped by their… measure groups, hierarchically like they are when browsing a cube in SSMS or Visual Studio. Measures are easy enough to find as a collection on the CubeDef object as a MeasureCollection. But where are measure groups hiding?

Naturally I would have thought there would be a MeasureGroup or MeasureGroupCollection off the CubeDef – no such luck. Debugging and taking a closer look at the Measure object, in the PropertyCollection (the Properties member) I spyed the property MEASUREGROUP_NAME. The sweet smell of victory. So to get your measure’s measure group here is the C#:

Property measureGroupProperty = measure.Properties["MEASUREGROUP_NAME"];
string measureGroupName = measureGroupProperty.Value.ToString();


I was recently playing about with hiding the All member for several dimension attributes in my SSAS project. In order to hide the All member we set the IsAggregatable property to False. This immediately had the effect of my queries not returning any results. In hindsight my problem should have been blindingly obvious.

When we no longer aggregate the members on a dimension attribute, SSAS does not know what member/members to use unless you tell it explcitly, or set the DefaultMember attribute. Doing one or the other will stop your measures and calculations from vanishing.