Creating Analysis Services Cubes - SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Cube Development - page 81

Measure property Explanation

This is a very useful property for customizing how the
measure is presented to cube users. For example, we
could specify that the measure should be formatted in cur-
rency or percent. You can also specify the number of digits
to the right of a decimal point.

FormatString

The supported values of this property are true (default)
and false. You might want to create a measure that is
used for further calculations but should not be exposed to
the user. In such a case you'd set the measure's visible
property to false.

Visible

This function defines various properties of the relational
column used as the source of the measure. You can set
the data type and size (for seldom-used textual meas-
ures). The additional useful properties in this group in-
clude:

Source

• NullProcessing : This property advises SSAS
whether null values should result in an error or be
quietly translated to zero. In terms of Analysis Ser-
vices, zero is the same as NULL.
• InvalidXMLCharacters : This property advises
SSAS how to treat invalid XML characters at query
time. You might need to tweak this property for di-
mension attributes more frequently than measures,
since measures are normally numeric whereas di-
mension attributes could include special charac-
ters such as & , < , and > , which have special mean-
ings in XML. Data with such characters is gener-
ally processed fine but could return errors during