Handling Unknown Member

[LAM]

Hi, just a Cognos newbie using Express 10.1.1

I've created model using 3-layer approach, as well as setting up the relationships in FM. One of the activity fact table is linked to the venue dimension table, but not every activity record has a venue value, i.e. the venue code column in the fact table is nullable.

The relationship between them is:
1..n  Each Venue has one or more Activity
0..1  Each Activity has zero or one Venue (outer join)

My problem is, report studio is not showing the activities with no corresponding venue. But I kind of need this piece of information. So is there any extra step to make RS show the unknown member?

Thanks in advance.

[bdbits]

Relational or dimensional? What kind of report (list, crosstab, etc.)?

If it is dimensional, I would recommend your dimensions each have a single row you use to link with the fact table when it has no other valid row in the dimension. We usually do this and set label values to "Unknown". This has the benefits of not having situations like you are describing, and tells the user that they probably have some data to clean up. We also usually provide package drill-through reports, so they can find the "bad" data relatively easily.