Drillthroughs Going Wild

Got bit by an unfortunate bug which has been around for four years since it got reported on connect.microsoft.com with Analysis Services OLAP drillthrough. It caused me almost a day to figure out. Drillthrough actions (both default and explicit drillthrough) won’t return any rows on some cells or would return repeating rows for other cells. As I posted on connect the bug springs to action when:

  1. The measure group has IgnoreUnrelatedDimensions=False. Bryan Smith provides a great coverage of IgnoreUnrelatedDimensions in this blog.
  2. A dimension attribute has IsAggregatable set to False. Setting the dimension default member either using the DefaultMember attribute property or via script doesn’t make a difference.

In my case, I had a Time Calculations dimension which was a free floater and it had IsAggregatable=False. Excluding the unrelated dimensions from the drillthrough action doesn’t make a difference either. The only workaround I’ve found is to set IgnoreUnrelatedDimensions back to True. Vote for a due fix, please!