Drilling Through on Dates Between PowerCubes and Relational Packages

The usual method of drilling through from OLAP to relational packages requires that the target report parameter is set using the business key in the relational data, which does not work well for dates.

OLAP data sources typically view dates as members, such as Quarter 1 2012, while relational data sources view dates as ranges, such as 1/Jan/2012 to 31/March/2012.

A special feature exists for drilling through between PowerCubes and relational packages. Ensure that the target report parameter is set up using in_range. The parameter must be of type date-time, and not integer.

An example follows:

[gosales_goretailers].[Orders].[Order date] in_range ?Date?

Also ensure that the drill-through definition maps the parameter at the dimension level and that the PowerCube date level is not set to suppress blank categories. Enabling the option to suppress blank categories in the Transformer model before you build the cube may cause the drill-through on dates to be unsuccessful. This happens because there are missing values in the range.