Perspectives (SSAS Tabular)

  • Article

Perspectives, in tabular models, define viewable subsets of a model that provide focused, business-specific, or application-specific viewpoints of the model.

Sections in this topic:

  • Benefits

  • Testing Perspectives

  • Specifying a Perspective in a Shared Report Data Source (.rsds) Connection

  • Related Tasks

Benefits

Tabular models can be very complex for users to explore. A single model can represent the contents of a complete data warehouse with many tables, measures, and dimensions. Such complexity can be daunting to users who may only need to interact with a small part of the model in order to satisfy their business intelligence and reporting requirements.

In a perspective, tables, columns, and measures (including KPIs) are defined as field objects. You can select the viewable fields for each perspective. For example, a single model may contain product, sales, financial, employee, and geographic data. While a sales department requires product, sales, promotions, and geography data, they likely do not require employee and financial data. Similarly, a human resources department does not require data about sales promotions and geography.

When a user connects to a model (as a data source) with defined perspectives, the user can select the perspective they want to use. For example, when connecting to a model data source in Excel, users in Human Resources can select the Human Resources perspective on the Select Tables and Views page of the Data Connection Wizard. Only fields (tables, columns, and measures) defined for the Human Resources perspective will be visible in the PivotTable Field List.

Perspectives are not meant to be used as a security mechanism, but as a tool for providing a better user experience. All security for a particular perspective is inherited from the underlying model. Perspectives cannot provide access to model objects to which a user does not already have access. Security for the model database must be resolved before access to objects in the model can be provided through a perspective. Security roles can be used to secure model metadata and data. For more information, see Roles (SSAS Tabular).

Testing Perspectives

When authoring a model, you can use the Analyze in Excel feature in the model designer to test the efficacy of the perspectives you have defined. From the Model menu in the model designer, when you click Analyze in Excel, before Excel opens, the Choose Credentials and Perspective dialog box appears. In this dialog, you can specify the current username, a different user, a role, and a perspective with which you will use to connect to the model workspace database as a data source and view data.

Specifying a Perspective in a Shared Report Data Source (.rsds) Connection

You can specify a perspective in the Connection String property of a shared report server data source connection (.rsds) file in SharePoint. Users creating a report based on the .rsds view only those objects configured for the perspective.

A single perspective can be specified in the cube= setting of the connection string.

Data source=<servername>;initial catalog=<databasename>;cube='<perspectivename>’

For more information, see Create and Manage Shared Data Sources (Reporting Services in SharePoint Integrated Mode).

Topic

Description

Create and Manage Perspectives (SSAS Tabular)

Describes how to create and manage perspectives using the Perspectives dialog box in the model designer.

See Also

Concepts

Roles (SSAS Tabular)

Hierarchies (SSAS Tabular)