Question

I’ve been bagning my head on this one for a few days and could really need some insight.

In a MDX select statement you can create a member like this:

WITH MEMBER [Measures].[Legal Closing Date] as [Entity].[Entity].CurrentMember.Properties("Legal Closing Date", TYPED)

and then use that in the select to get the values in a strongly typed manner.

Is there any way to get the same result (having a strongly typed date, in my case) when accessing that property in the following manner:

SELECT 
{[Measures].[Total Commitment]} ON COLUMNS, 

NON EMPTY [Investee].[Entity].[All].Children
DIMENSION PROPERTIES 
    [Entity].[Entity].[Legal Closing Date],
    MEMBER_CAPTION, 
    MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME
ON ROWS
FROM 
[FIA_DM]

Using this manner, the ssrs report I have that is based on this select statement sees the date as a string and even a cdate returns errors because it incorrecly interprets the first digits as the month when it is actually the day, etc.

I know that technically, I should be able to use the WITH statement and I would get, as per my examples, the same result (only with a typed date), but I simplfied my select statement here and because I use other dimensions on rows (crossjoining them), using the WITH statement brings quite a few other headaches.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

It’s only possible to get the member property’s typed value with the Properties function.

• Mosha Pasumansky has a post in his (old) blog about it;
• While it’s mentioned on MDSN’s reference page for Properties MDX function on how to get the strongly typed value of the member property, there’s no mention about it on the PROPERTIES keyword.