Heya everyone,
I'm fairly new to OLAP Report Studio development, and I've got a general question for everyone: Is there a good way to handle non-existent members in Report Studio?
For some background, we set the inclusion in Transformer to suppress blank categories for performance purposes (our cubes are too big!), and our cubes have a rolling lookback window to drop old data (again, cubes too big).
I've run into a situation where a very granular business requirement resulted in a set of explicit members. At year end rollover, one of those members had all of its fact transactions drop outside the lookback window, meaning it no longer has associated measures and, thanks to our inclusion strategy, was dropped from the cube. This caused all of the reports that reference it to bomb out because they can't validate that the member exists... because it doesn't ;)
I know I could change the inclusion to allow the member to flow through, but I'm curious - is there a way to dynamically handle this sort of thing? To tell Report Studio that if it can't find a member in a set, to just move on?
Thanks!
It all hinges on how you build the specific report. If you reference a member directly, the MUN of that member is hard-coded into the report spec, and you see the kinds of issues you are reporting here if the member subsequently disappears or if its MUN changes. If you use expressions to isolate the relevant sets of members instead of addressing them directly you can get around this - eg use a filter() function to select relevant members or children() / descendants() of the root member (which will always be there).
Cheers!
MF.