I created some nice data cubes using SAS Data Integration Studio recently. I had a local, regional, and state-level hierarchy for my geographical dimension as well as a monthly, quarterly, and annual hierarchy for my time dimension. I had eight measures which were vital for assessing where the organization was through time. I added drill-through to detail records capability and useful, descriptive names for all of measures, hierarchies, and dimensions. To present my cube to the staff via SAS Web Report Studio, I needed to make an information map first. I loaded up SAS Information Map Studio 3.1 (IMS 3.1) and added my cube data. I dragged my dimensions and measures over to the new information map window and noticed that the descriptive names of my measures were truncated. I went to the properties of those measures and tried to add the missing letters. Each attempt to save my edits prompted a dialog box stating “This data item label is invalid”. I counted up the characters in each of the truncated names and noticed that 30 characters was the magic number. I opened up some of my other information maps that had measure names longer than 30 characters, and they looked and worked fine – but they weren’t built from OLAP cubes.
I browsed to support.sas.com, and then drilled down to the Hot Fix page for Information Map Studio 3.1. Compared to the other SAS tools I use, there were relatively few issues addressed in the five hot fix history of IMS 3.1. Browsing down the issue list I did notice the magic number 30, and sure enough, the issue “Measure captions are limited to 30 characters for OLAP information maps” was fixed in hot fix 31MAPCNTR03. I did not have any hot fixes applied, so I downloaded the latest one (31MAPCNTR06) from ftp://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/hotfix/ims31.html. I applied the hot fix, opened Information Map Studio, added my cube data, and created my information map without a problem.