Hi,

Many of my users have asked for a way of selecting "Month to date" that can remain in place without having to physically change the month in a date hierarchy.  I came up with a way of doing it by creating a pseudocolumn "Current Month" which shows a "Y" if it matches today's month and an N for all other rows.  This has worked effectively, however now i am being asked if it could show "Month YYYY" as opposed to the "Y".

My issue with this is having a default member auto selected in a filtered dimension.  I am not sure if this is possible.  

I have tried setting a current month dimension member to non aggregateable and then forcing a default member, but that is global without even selecting anything.

Can anybody think of any other way of making the field automatically select when filtered? (Obviously this is necessary because if it says March, and then when it turns into April the data changes and the selection cancels).

Hoping somebody has an idea!

thanks

Each dimension attribute can have KeyColumns and a NameColumn. As long as the KeyColumn continues to say Y you should be able to set the NameColumn to a column that's the current month name "April 2015" and the selection in Excel won't be lost. I think that should work but please report back once you test.

Hi,

Thanks for the great suggestion.  I applied this, but once i did it complained about a duplicate attribute, so i added another key to make it unique but once you do that it shows all months and years in the selection - ideally i want it to just show the current month in the selection (otherwise it is no different to selecting a month from a regular date hierarchy).

I will continue to work on this idea though because there could be a solution in there!

Thanks

If you have a table that looks like this (shown as a CSV) I think it will work:
Month,CurrentMonthKey,CurrentMonthName
Jan2015,N,N
Feb2015,N,N
Mar2015,Y,Y