The Connection Formula setting for PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer is quite useful in many instances. For example, if we want to create a report with the top 10 US states by the revenue generated by employees in that state, then we can build the filter using a dimension hierarchy like Employees by State. The problem is that we cannot simply connect this filter to the chart by connecting it directly to one of the chart dimensions. The reason is that if we select "Arizona" from the hierarchy, the natural result that we would want to see in the chart is for it to show the top 10 Employees for Arizona.
To get the desired result, we somehow have to specify that when we select "Arizona" we want to pass all the Employees in Arizona as a parameter to the report. The report can then do all the filtering on this set which includes only Employees from the desired state.
This is where the Connection Formula property comes in very handy. When creating a connection between a filter and a report, it is possible to specify a Connection Formula so that you can actually specify exactly what custom values you want to pass to the report when this filter is used.
The formula has to be written in MDX where <<SourceValue>> refers to the value in the filter, that is selected by the user.
For instance, in the above mentioned case we can use something like the below MDX query (the syntax might not be exactly right). The query assumes that we are using a Employee by Location hierarchy that contains all the Employees as Children of the state members in the hierarchy.
IIF(<<SourceValue>>.Member_Name = 'Arizona', [Hierarchy].[Arizona].Children, "whatever else you want to do here")
Please let me know if I can be of any help,
Thanks,
Hermann