Controling fields visibility in Excel, and re-cubing - Tom Dacon

For your first question, take a look at the AttributeHierarchyEnabled and
AttributeHierarchyVisible properties of dimension attributes. Read a little
about AttributeHierarchyOptimizedState and AttributeHierarchyOrdered while
you're there.

Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting

Controling fields visibility in Excel, and re-cubing - Tom Dacon

If they're only used in calculations and references, there's no need for the
user to know about them, so you can hide them. Likewise with optimized and
ordered - unless the user is going to want to work with them you can save
some time in generating the cube.

But if you want the user to be able to work directly with them, you can make
the attrubute hierarchy visible.

Tom

Controling fields visibility in Excel, and re-cubing - Tom Dacon

Johnathan, there's no way for me to know how your cube is set up, but if
when you look at a dimension in the dimension designer you see a thing as an
attribute in the attributes pane, and it's enabled and visible, the user's
going to see it, as far as I know.  If SSAS has other reasons to hide them,
I sure don't know what those reasons might be. But I'm no expert, so I won't
bet my farm on it.

Good luck,
Tom

Controling fields visibility in Excel, and re-cubing - Jonathan Sion

Hi
In our organization, users mostly use Excel 2007 to view the cube.
our cube is quite large, and both facts and dimensions have many
fields that I wish to hide for the users. for facts, they have the
'visible' property which i can turn off and i assume that would do it
(haven't verified yet) but for dimensions' attributes I dont see
anything like that. is there any way this could be achieved?

and also, here's a nwebie question: after I change any such
attributes, I obviously need to re-cube the whole thing so users could
see it. our cubing process is now 3 hours, and growing. Is there any
way to do 'incremental ubing', so it would just reflect these changes
but NOT go through the whole data again?
thanks

Controling fields visibility in Excel, and re-cubing - Jonathan Sion

Thanks for the lead, Tom. that's pretty much the right direction.
Now, tell me: can you think of ANY reason why a certain dimension
attribute wuold NOT be visible? some of the attributes in a cube i
inherited are NOT shown, and I can't see anything different in their
properties from those who ARE shown.AttributeHierarchyEnabled=True,
AttributeHierarchyVisible=True... like i said they are the same like
any other attributes, (i went over all their properties one by one)
but for some reason some of them are not visible in excel. any ideas
why?

thanks!

Controling fields visibility in Excel, and re-cubing - Jonathan Sion

Hi Tom,
I'm not sure my posting was completly clear: I understand that I can
hide and show them, and why. the thing is, in a cube i already have,
some are not shown in the final cube, and I am not sure why. For each
attribute, visible or not, i went property by property, and they all
match. is there any reason why SSAS on its own 'hide' an attribute? or
maybe not on its own, but its some other property apart from direct
attribute properties?

Thanks

Controling fields visibility in Excel, and re-cubing - Tom Dacon

Ouch!!!

Good catch - this one goes into my favorites.

Tom

Controling fields visibility in Excel, and re-cubing - Jonathan Sion

Hi Tom,
I've found the answer! there is more than one plae you need to set the
attributes:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3002499&SiteID=1

(and elsewhere, if you google 'ssaS attribute not visible' or anything
like that)

cool. they'll keep me around now. more billable hours for me

Still you've helped me plenty and I want to thank you!

Jonathan