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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T02:50:03+00:00

I’m creating Analysis Services cubes in Visual Studio BIDS, and have a question about

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I’m creating Analysis Services cubes in Visual Studio BIDS, and have a question about summing in calculated members.

The data has to do with commercial real estate transactions. I want to sum square feet of building space involved in sales transactions for each region. I’m going to use that result in a weighted average calculation. However, I only want to sum the square feet of transactions which have non-null values for the corresponding building capitalization rate (cap rate) member.

Here is a drill-down to Athens in the cube browser:

BIDS browser

Note that Athens has 15 values for square feet, but only 5 values for cap rate, reflecting my relational data source as shown here:

SQL Server query result

So, I only want to sum the five square feet values that have associated cap rate values. Doing the math with the relational query result above you can see that this should result in a sum just over 900K, not the 2 million+ sum shown in the BIDS screenshot.

My attempt at this calculation:

sum(
descendants(
            [Property].[Property by Region].CurrentMember,
            [Property].[Property by Region].[Metro Area]
            ),
iif([Measures].[Cap Rate] is null or [Measures].[Sq Ft] is null, 0, 
    [Measures].[Sq Ft])
)

ends up including the square feet values that have no corresponding cap rates, so I still end up with a value in the 2 millions.

Why is my iff() clause not working as one would expect?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I was finally able to create the weighted average calculation using a combination of Named Calculations in the Data Source View (DSV) and a calculated member (in the cube script). First, I went to the DSV and added a named calculation called xWeightedCapRt with a formula as follows:

    CASE WHEN CapRate IS Null THEN Null Else CapRate * SqFt END

    In the cube, I then added xWeightedCapRt as a New Measure. I set its aggregation function to Sum and left its Visible property set to True temporarily.

    I created an additional Named Calculation called “xSqFt”, defined as:

    CASE WHEN CapRate IS Null THEN Null Else SqFt END

    and again created a corresponding measure.

    On the Calculation tab (of the cube designer) I created a new calculated member, [WAvg Cap Rate by Sq Ft], with the following formula:

    [Measures].[x Weighted Cap Rt] / [Measures].[x Sq Ft]

    After deploying and processing the cube, I was able to verify that the weighted average calculation matched my spreadsheet numbers. At that point, I set the Visible property of the two intermediate measures to False and redeployed.

    What I’ve learned is that calculations at the “row-level” are best performed through the DSV. You can then use those to build up more complex calculations within the cube.

    (NOTE: One thing that needs to be added to the steps above is logic to handle division by zeros.)

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