Analysis Services Actions and Drillthrough Capabilities Supported in PerformancePoint

There are two places that Analysis Services Drillthrough and Actions are surfaced in PerformancePoint monitoring and analytics:

1. Deployed Scorecards

2. Analytic Grids and Charts

I've been asked a few times why Show Details is disabled, or a given action doesn't show up, or why the Additional Actions menu shows that "No Actions Exist" in some cases when you know they do exist.

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We are hoping to clear all this up and support drillthrough and all actions, everywhere, in a future release, but here's how it works right now:

In Scorecards:

Analysis Services Drillthrough is available, by right-clicking on a cell, and choosing Show Details. Sometimes, Show Details is disabled. This can happen for the following reasons:

1. The cell in the scorecard is not an Analysis Services cell. It might be an aggregation that is computed by the scorecard itself, in which case there is not really a cube cell to drillthrough to.

2. The cell in the scorecard must have the aggregation type of "Source Data". This is not the default, so it is very common that this is the problem.
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3. The user doesn't have drillthrough permission on the cube. It's a little-known fact that PPS connects to Analysis Services through the "Application Pool" user rather than the logged in user by default. See the post on PPS Security for more details on this.

Note that scorecards don't show Drillthrough when a user is in the dashboard designer.

We don't support Actions on scorecards yet, but that should be coming in a future version.

In Analytic Grids and Charts:

Drillthrough is available, and also issue #3 mentioned above for scorecards can also be a problem. #1 and #2 are not an issue for analytic reports.

All 3 types of Actions are available (URL, Drillthrough, and Reporting Services). The HTML actions that used to be supported by Analysis Services, but that were deprecated in AS2005 are not available.

Also, very importantly, only cell-level actions are supported. So actions that you have attached to dimensions, members, the entire cube, etc. will not show up in the product.

Both Drillthrough and Actions are available in deployed dashboards and the dashboard designer.

 

Greg Bernhardt (gregbern@microsoft.com)