These past couple weeks I faced a client requirement to create an SSRS Report Action in an SSAS cube. This requirement dictated that a user should be able to browse a cube in an Excel pivot table and be able to drill through to an SSRS report (which used SQL Server as the data source) and view data at a monthly level. The twist was that if the user drilled from a year or quarter level, the appropriate months would be selected by default. I thought the solution I came up with was useful so here you have it, as recreated using Adventure Works 🙂 . I won’t walk through the step-by-step of creating a Report Action in SSAS, but I will hit the high points of overcoming this requirement.

I created the report action in the Cube Designer in SSDT and called it SSRS Sales Report. Because I want the users to be able to click on a measure, I set the Target type to “Cells” and the Target object to “All cells”.

But I really only want the users to see the action if they right-click the Reseller Sales Amount measure, so I added the following conditional logic so the action will only appear for the Reseller Sales Amount.

If you wanted to limit the action to appear beneath more than one measure but not all measures, just use “or” and specify other measures as seen in the example below. Also, in my specific requirement, the action should only work for a certain time frame (2007 forward in this example) so I added the logic you see after the “and”.

(Measures.CurrentMember is [Measures].[Reseller Sales Amount] 
    or Measures.CurrentMember is [Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]) 
and 
COUNT(
    Intersect(
        {[Date].[Calendar Year].&[2007]:NULL},
        [Date].[Calendar Year].CURRENTMEMBER)
    ) > 0

Next, I added in the Report Server URL and SSRS report link. In my case, the report server was SharePoint Integrated.

Now this is where things start to get interesting. I need to dynamically pass the year and month values to the SSRS report. What values to pass from SSAS really depends on the parameters in the SSRS report. If the SSRS report is using SSAS as a data source, then you may be able to use the unique name of the attribute members. In my case, the SSRS report used a regular ole SQL Server database as the data source so I needed to format the parameter values appropriately. The Parameter Name values should reflect the name of the parameters in the SSRS report. Also, if you’re using an SSRS report in SharePoint, don’t forget to include “rp:” as a prefix on the parameter name. For example, if your parameter is named “Year”, the parameter name you would enter into the action would be “rp:Year”. Again, this only applies if your SSRS report server is SharePoint integrated.

In the table below, you’ll noticed I’m using the Right function to return the right four characters of the name of the Calendar Year member. This is because in SSAS the Calendar Year caption appears as “CY 2007” for 2007 for example. In the SSRS report, however, the parameter value would be “2007”. The Month parameter is a little trickier. Because I want the user to be able to view multiple months at a time depending on what level of the Date Hierarchy they click on, I used the Generate function with the Descendants function to create a comma delimited string of the member values at the month level.

So if you’re wondering what the Generate function is doing here, take a look at the following query and the query results and that should clear it up for you.

with member [Measures].[Months param] as 

GENERATE(
    DESCENDANTS([Date].[Calendar].CURRENTMEMBER, [Date].[Calendar].[Month]),
    LEFT([Date].[Calendar].CURRENTMEMBER.NAME,3),
    "&rp:Month=") 

Select [Measures].[Months param] on 0,

DESCENDANTS(
    [Date].[Calendar].MEMBERS, 
    [Date].[Calendar].[Month],
    SELF_AND_BEFORE
    )  on 1
From [Adventure Works]

 
In the results you can see that one of the neat things the Generate function can do is to create a delimited list. The third argument of the Generate function is my delimiter and in this case, I want it to be “&rp:Month=” so I can specify multiple values to pass to the parameter in the SSRS report. So if the user right-clicks a quarter, 3 months will be passed to the report. If the user clicks a semester, 6 months should be passed.

And here’s a screen cap of the Parameters in the Cube Design in SSDT in case you were wondering.

The last step is to make the caption for the action dynamic. Set the Caption is MDX to “True” and then you can do neat things with the action like use the CurrentMember’s Name property in the caption of the action.

Here’s the complete screen grab of the Action if you need it:

So that’s fantastic and all but what does it look like on the end user’s end? Here I have a pivot table with my date hierarchy and a couple measures. If I right-click the Reseller Sales Amount for Q4 2007, select Additional Actions, you’ll see the caption for my brand new action: View SSRS Sales Report for Q4 CY 2007.

And the report correctly picks up the values from the Action:

Keep in mind that this action works for any level of the Date Hierarchy down to the date level. Very slick!

If you look at the URL, you can see that the parameters being passed to the report through the URL query string:

http://spsqlbi/sites/BI%20Center%20Test/_layouts/15/ReportServer/RSViewerPage.aspx?rv:RelativeReportUrl=/sites/BI%20Center%20Test/Reporting%20Services/Adventure%20Works%20Reports/SalesReport.rdl&rp:Year=2007&rp:Month=Oct&rp:Month=Nov&rp:Month=Dec&rs:Command=Render&rs:Renderer=HTML5

Chances are that you’ll have to struggle through this a few times like I did. So here’s a couple tips to help you troubleshoot:

1. If the action does not appear where you expect it to in the pivot table, then there could be a syntax issue with your MDX in the Action definition in SSDT. Double-check your MDX.
2. If the action takes you to the report correctly, but the values in the parameters aren’t selected, then you probably aren’t passing the correct values to the report for the parameter. For example, if the Month parameter in the report uses Month Number as the values (ie 1 = Jan, 2 = Feb, etc) but you pass “January” from the Action, then the value will not be automatically selected.
3. Lastly, you are subject to the URL query string character limit in place by the browser. For example, IE has a limit of 2,083 characters last I checked, so if you’re trying to pass a selection of 500 customer values to an SSRS report you will probably run into some problems.

I hope that some of you out there found this useful. If you did, share it with a friend or leave me a comment and let me know! Thanks!