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Defining Perspectives

A perspective is a subset of a cube created for a particular application or group of users. The cube itself is the default perspective. A perspective is exposed to a client as a cube. When a user views a perspective, it appears like another cube. Any changes made to cube data through writeback in the perspective are to the original cube. For more information about the views in Analysis Services, see Perspectives.

Use the Perspectives tab in Cube Designer to create or modify perspectives in a cube. The first column of the Perspectives tab is the Cube Objects column, which lists all the objects in the cube. This corresponds to the default perspective for the cube, which is the cube itself.

Creating or Deleting Perspectives

You can add a perspective to the Perspectives tab by clicking New Perspective on the Cube menu. You can also click the New Perspective button on the toolbar, or right-click anywhere in the pane and click New Perspective on the shortcut menu. You can add any number of perspectives to a cube.

To remove a perspective, first click any cell in the column for the perspective that you want to delete. Then, on the Cube menu, click Delete Perspective. You can also click the Delete Perspective button on the toolbar, or right-click any cell in the perspective you want to delete, and then click Delete Perspective on the shortcut menu.

Renaming Perspectives

The first row of each perspective shows its name. When you create a perspective, the name is initially Perspective (followed by an ordinal number, starting with 1, if there is already a perspective called Perspective). You can click the name to edit it.

Hiding Objects from a Perspective

To hide an object from a perspective, clear the check box in the row that corresponds to the object in the column for the perspective. The cube objects that can be hidden from a perspective are:

  • Measure groups

  • Measures

  • Dimensions

  • Hierarchies

  • Named sets

  • KPIs

  • Actions

  • Calculated members

To view any object, expand the category (Measure Groups, Dimensions, KPIs, Calculations, or Actions) for any object type under Cube Objects. To view hierarchies or attributes in a dimension, first expand a dimension, and then expand the Hierarchies or Attributes row. To view measures in a measure group, expand the measure group.

See Also

Concepts