Referencing reporting dimension's members in MDX formulas
MDX formulas that were used in previous recipes referred to either existing cube measures or other dimension's members. There were no relations between report items themselves; each stood alone in the hierarchy. That is, until we introduced unary operators (in the previous recipe) and showed how to replace simple formulas with an operator.
Still, unary operators are very limited in what they support. As their name says, they are operators, not expressions. They can help us by not having to specify every formula in case the values can be rolled up from children. And that's it.
The other way to enhance the reporting dimension is to allow references to its members in MDX formulas. It makes perfect sense to do so. It is the end users who will eventually fill the metadata in Excel. They know their report items the best.
They might not know much about the cube and its objects (dimensions, measures, attributes, and so on), but if they see report...
