"An invalid member name was encountered in the MDX statement" when displaying a SASĀ® Web Report Studio report after a cube update


When opening an OLAP-based report, you might see an error that is similar to the following.

Formula error - An invalid member name was encountered in the MDX statement - near: "[Time].[All Time].[1993]"

If you see this error after the underlying cube is updated, then the report's XML likely contains a hard-coded path to a value that is no longer accessible to you. For example, the previous error message might appear if the year 1993 has been removed from the cube.

The inaccessible path might have been hard-coded into the report's XML when the report was saved in a filtered, drilled, or expanded state. For example, if the report was saved while it was expanded down to the year 1993, the report's XML might include the following line.

<DataItemNavigationFilter actionType="SPECIAL" levelName="[Time].[YEAR]" navFilterType="CHILDREN" navName="[Time].[All Time].[1993]" />

If 1993 is no longer accessible, then the hard-coded path to 1993 is no longer valid and the error occurs. This situation is analogous to what happens when an HTML page referenced by a URL has been deleted, moved, or renamed. For example, assume that, at some point, a URL path such as the following was valid:

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/tnote/sixsigma.html.

If the sixsigma.html page is later deleted, then subsequent attempts to access the URL will typically return an error similar to "We are unable to find the page you've requested."

As a workaround, you can try one of the following:

To prevent this error from occurring, there are a couple of options: