Dimension Security Tips, Tricks and Problems

I've been doing some work with complex dimension security recently and come across a number of issues which I've either known about but never blogged about, or only just become aware of. It's a bit of a random list but hopefully it'll help someone out there...

First of all, how do you use dimension security to deny access to an entire dimension? It was one of those things that I thought was possible out of the box even back in the days of AS2K but it turned out my memory was playing tricks with me and it's a lot harder to do than you might think. Dimension security lets you deny access to individual members, so to deny access to the entire dimension you have to deny access to all the members on every single attribute hierarchy on the dimension - which is a right pain in the **** to do. From reading the relevant pages in the book "Microsoft Analysis Services 2005" (which is very good on the subject of security) I had thought it would be enough to set the Allowed Set on the key attribute to be an empty set, ie {}, and indeed this is what I'd been told would work. However this only has the effect of denying access to the key attribute itself and as I said you need to set the Allowed Set to {} for every attribute.

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