No text in cubes?

[Rutulian]

Hi All,

I'm having trouble putting text into a measure in a powercube.  So much trouble, in fact, that I'm starting to think that it's not possible.  I know obviously all your aggregations etc. aren't going to work, but how do you generally do things like allow for text annotations to explain data items?

Thanks
Alexis

[RobsWalker68]

Hi Alexis,

Yes, you are correct the measure needs to be numeric and cannot be a non numeric type.  There is a limited workaround to display dates through the use of conditional formatting but not strings.

Descriptions for data items are easy enough using association for a given level and entering the description into description or short name etc and then using the rolevalue function in a report.  A description for a measure though I haven't got a clue so would be interested as we'll to hear of any ingenious solutions.

Rgds

Rob

[Rutulian]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the response - saved me banging my head against a brick wall!  For my current task, it's enough to work around by generating Excel reports with blank cells and having the users enter annotations there, it would have been nice to push them through from EP into PDF reports but this is the 2nd problem doing that (also hit an unrelated bug with the Analyst Publish Macro not doing annotations well in the version we're on).

For any future readers, building an FM package on top of the PowerCube linking to my annotations table somehow looks like it might be an option.  I have to confess though that my preferred one would be to just use something that supports text attributes as properties of aggregatable measures, a bit of reading suggests that newer versions of SSAS might.

Cheers,

A

[RobsWalker68]

Hi Alexis,

Came across this possible solution.  It may not match your solution but perhaps worth a look

http://businessintelligence.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/cognos8-l/cross-tab-with-text-as-measure-3422848

Cheers

Rob