Thursday, June 02, 2005

Books Online needs some enhancement

The documentation in BOL is a pain when there is no direct solution or a description is apparent to the naked eye. The only way is the good old RnD way where you end up knowing more about other issues than the one you are interested in.
I am still an alien to the C# world and my only super guide is the BOL. This was one of those cases when I was looking for a solution to populate the "All caption" property of the Dimension with DSO and I ended up knowing loads more about DSO and its architecture.
The All level is not a physical level in a Shared Dimension in Analysis Services but is probably the most important level (if it exists) as far as the Shared Dimension is concerned. To have an All level in a Shared Dimension it is specified at the Dimension level and the All Caption by default will be the All concatenated with the dimension name. This can be changed at ant time but one has to make sure that no other levels in that dimension exist with the same name.
Simple when created in Analysis Services itself. But I spent almost 2 days to create this All Caption using DSO in C#. The problem was that I could not find the AllCaption property in the Dimension or the Level Interface. Also there was not documentation in the BOL for the same. So I entered into the RnD mode and found the solution. We have to use the MemberKeyColumn property of the level interface to create the All Caption. If the MemberNameColumn property is used then the compiler throws an exception. The fact is that I there are a lot of properties like this that when used in a certain way throw an exception and there are no documentation of this in the BOL.
As I am new to C# and relatively an infant in OOP, This was a nice experience.
Needless that I say.....no knowledge is a waste. One will find its use somewhere sometime......so keep learning.

# posted by Gautham Kamath @ 20:42

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