At this point, we will
give the Account dimension members in our cube meaningful names - names
that make sense to accounting / finance knowledge workers. While many
accountants and / or their counterparts in finance know the chart of accounts
by account codes, from daily usage and coding conventions, other information
consumers will need to know the account names. To strike a useful compromise,
let's give them both, by using the Member Name Column property of
our new Account dimension.
37.
Click the Account dimension,
to select it in the cube tree.
38.
Click the Advanced tab in the Properties
pane.
39.
Modify the All Caption
to read All Accounts.
40.
Click the Account_Id level that
appears below the Account dimension to select it.
41.
Select the Basic tab, then the Name
property.
42.
Change the Name to Account.
43.
Select the Member Name
Column property.
44.
Type the following expression
into the property field:
Cstr("account"."account_id")+
' ' +"account"."account_description"
Note that we are simply
concatenating the Account ID (an Integer) and the Account Name,
either or both of which we have determined might be helpful to information
consumers in the use of the cube we are designing. The CStr function in
the expression allows us to combine different data types in the concatenation,
converting the Account ID (an integer data type) to a string to make it
compatible with the string data type of the Account Description. Cube
processing will fail if we do not make this conversion.
While MDX (which
underlies the expressions we use in working with member properties) has no
conversion functions to meet the immediate need, MDX allows us to access external
functions; CStr is one of many VBA functions automatically
included in MDX. (A list of available external functions can be obtained from
the SQL Server 2000 Books Online, which references resources for
more details within the MSDN Library and other documentation.
45.
Press the Enter key.
The Properties
pane, with the modifications, should appear as shown below:
Illustration 44:
The Modified Properties, Account Level Member of the Account Dimension
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