Hiding measures above Country level

Hello,
I have the following problem I would appreciate your help with:
I am designing a cube “Cost Benchmarking” using Analysis Server 2000 with the following structure (simplified for the sake of this post):
Dimensions: Countries (levels: (All), Regions, Countries)
Clients (levels: Client)
Media (levels: TV Station)
Months (levels: Years, Quarters, Months)
Measures:
Cost (amount of money the clients spent on advertising, in local currency),
Cost in USD (Cost converted to USD at the fact record level),
Impressions (raw number of impressions the ad campaign achieved, in thousands),
CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions, calculated = Cost/Impressions)

The problem is that several measures do not make business sense to aggregate above the country level, namely Cost, Impressions and CPM. Users don’t even want to see those measures until a country is specified (we are planning on using Excel Pivot Table as a client).‘Cost in USD’ however can be aggregated at the Region and (All) levels.

Is there a way to hide those measures above the Country level?

Thanks
Kliment

If you're using AS 2000 Enterprise Edition, you could use the calculated cell feature, to clear cells with the relevant measures above the country level:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/olapdmad/agmeasures_2ttf.asp

>>

Calculated Cells

Calculated cells are cells whose value is calculated at run time using a Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) expression that you specify when you define the calculated cells. Additionally, the expression can be conditionally applied to specific cells, based on an MDX logical expression also specified when you define the calculated cells.

...

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hididng calculated measures in the cube browser window

hi i am currenly using analysis serivces 2005 for making cubes.

my problems are 2 fold

1)the list of calcualted measures is around 35 so when i go to browser window in the cube they actually give a very bad look.Can i make any folder within which we can keep all the calculated measures and then drill down according to the requirement. OR if i can divide all the calculated measures according to the need-- say "primary sales" calculated measure folder contains all the calculated measures that fall under that category and simlarly "order daily" contains all the calculated measures that fall under its category.

2)the end user will be accesing the cube using BIP now in the cube Dimension we can discriminate among the hierarchy and attributes by there default symbols but when we actually see it in the BIP window we cannot distinctly identify which is a attrribute and which is a hierarchy,which might confuse the business user.

kindly reply asap

cheers
Sid
..u can mail me at sidhuvirgoster@.gmail.com(for answer and further clarification of question)

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of good news for you.

1) you can put measures into display folders, there is a button on the toolbar of the calculations tab called "Calculation Properties" which lets you set this. (the button looks like a properties window with a little yellow hand over it)

2) Unfortunately BIP uses OWC which was written before AS2005 existed and it is not aware of attributes or hierarchies, it treats them all as just dimensions. There is no way around this and MS has discontinued development of OWC so it will not change in the future. And in relation to your first point, OWC is not aware of display folders either so all your measures will still be displayed in a big long list.

All I can suggest is to have a look at some of the other 3rd party browsers, Mosha has one of the most comprehensive lists around at www.mosha.com/msolap

|||About 2.

Why is this so important for the end user to see where the attribute hierarchy is? As far as i understand the model, an attribute hierarchy is still a hierarchy, which consists of one level and represents just a plain list of members of certain entity (attribute). They are visible to the end user by default, but the designer can make them invisible, leaving just those hierarchies, which do not confuse the user.

For the cube developer - yes it is more important to see what comes from what.|||

I agree that end users should not really care about the difference between attribute hierarchies and other hierarchies. And typically if I have "Month" in a user defined hierarchy I will hide the attribute hierarchy so they don't see the same thing twice. One problem I have seen is situation where two different dimensions have attributes with the same name.

eg.

[Date].[Financial] and [Organisation].[Financial] would both show up as just Financial in OWC

or [Ship Date].[Month] and [Order Date].[Month] would both show up as Month

The only real work around if you need to use an older client (like OWC) is to make sure that the levels/attributes that the users see have unique names (eg [Ship Date].[Ship Month], [Order Date].[Order Month])