Creating a Cell Within the Context of a Cube

For certain applications, it may be desirable to return data for a single cell within a cube. For example, executives may have a decision support application written in Microsoft Excel that uses data from a multidimensional data source. At the top of the main window when the application starts every day, they want to view the quarter-to-date worldwide sales for the current year across all products and customers.

The solution is to create a dataset for which all dimensions are slicer dimensions. The MDX statement for doing this take the following form:

SELECT FROM cube_name WHERE slicer_specification

This results in a dataset with exactly one cell. Because no axis dimensions are specified, the slicer specification zeroes in on the desired point in the entire cube.

Note that in this case where there are no axes and hence only one cell:

• GetAxisInfo returns 0 for *pcAxes and a null pointer in *prgAxisInfo.
  
  
• The axis rowsets for all axes will be empty, except for the axis MDAXIS_SLICERS. The slicers axis will contain information on the slicer conditions that created the single cell.
  
  
• The single cell can be addressed by the cell ordinal 0.