Advanced MDX - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services - page 159

FIGURE 11.1

Custom and intrinsic member properties.

. CELL_ORDINAL —The ordinal number of the cell in the resultset

. VALUE —The value of the cell

. FORMATTED_VALUE —The string that represents the value of the cell, with special for-
matting applied to it

When you write an MDX query, you can list other properties that you want to retrieve as
part of the query response. You can use the CELL PROPERTIES clause in the SELECT state-
ment to specify those properties. In the following query, we request the name of the font
that the client application can use to display the cell value and the string that Analysis
Services uses to format the value:

SELECT Measures.Members on COLUMNS FROM [Warehouse and Sales]
CELL PROPERTIES VALUE, FORMATTED_VALUE, FONT_NAME, FORMAT_STRING

Figure 11.2 shows the results of this query.

CAUTION
There is a small, but important, difference between cell properties and member proper-
ties:
. If a DIMENSION PROPERTIES clause is present in a query, all standard member prop-
erties are retrieved by the query.