Advanced Cube Design - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 422

mension members, levels, a set, specific cube cells, and so on. An action
command usually includes a command string, such as a URL, and the sug-
gested command behavior, such as opening a Web browser for the URL.
MDX expressions are often built into commands to include the context of the
user selection in the action. If a user initiates an action by selecting a product,
for example, an MDX expression could be used to generate a URL for a cata-
log page describing the selected product.

Action Types

Analysis Services 2005 supports seven action types. These action types em-
power client applications with more analytical capabilities than traditional
OLAP analysis drill up, drill down, and pivot activities. For example, if a sales
manager is analyzing sales for cities in Washington State, the ability to click
on a city member to view an MSN city map would be helpful. Similarly, if your
implementation includes Reporting Services, you could link a report that ana-
lyzes sales reasons by product category to the product category members by
adding an action to the cube. When the sales manager clicks a product cat-
egory, the action passes the selected product category as a parameter to the
report which then displays in a Web browser. If a sales number for a specific
region appears to be surprisingly high or low, the sales manager could use a
Drill-through action to retrieve all detailed transactions contributing to the
value. The seven action types supported in Analysis Services 2005 are listed
in the following table along with the information on what can be done by a cli-
ent when such an action type is returned by Analysis Services 2005.

Action Type Description

CommandLine Returns a command that can be run under command
prompt.

Returns an HTML script that can be rendered using HTML
browser.

HTML

Returns a URL that can be launched using a browser. Re-
port Action (to be see later) uses this Action type.

URL

Returns a statement that can be run as an OLE DB com-
mand.

Statement