Advanced Dimension Design - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 343

Using Properties to Customize Dimensions
Analysis Services provides several properties for use with hierarchies and di-
mensions. If every property were explained with illustrations and examples,
this chapter would be quite large, so in this section you learn about the proper-
ties that are likely to be used in fulfillment of most common business require-
ments.
Ordering Dimension Members
In Chapter 5 you learned to order dimension members of a hierarchy based on
key or named columns specified for the attribute. Based on that, Analysis Ser-
vices sorted the members in the hierarchy and you were able to see the order
while browsing the dimension. In certain business scenarios, you might have a
need to sort the members based on a specific value or based on some other
condition. Analysis Services 2005 provides properties to sort members of a
hierarchy in a variety of ways other than the key or named columns.
Analysis Services 2005 provides you an option to sort members of a hierarchy
based upon another attribute that is related or included as member property for
the primary attribute you want to sort. For example, if you have an Employees
hierarchy and if you have the age of the employees defined as a related attrib-
ute, you can set the appropriate properties to achieve a sorting of employees
based on age. You need to set the property OrderByAttribute to age and then
set the property OrderBy to either AttributeKey or AttributeName depending on
your requirements, and then deploy the changes to the Analysis Services in-
stance. These properties are shown in Figure 8-18 . You can see the changes
take effect by viewing the members in the Dimension Browser.