Referenced dimension via factless fact table

• nsontag

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  August 30, 2013 at 12:37 pm

  #281943

  Scenario:

  I have a fact table called FactProjectTransactions, which is linked related to an employee dimension table in two ways: the first is a direct regular relationship through the EmployeeKey column the FactProjectTransaction table. This represent the employee who made the transaction.

  The second relationship - which I'll call ResponsibleEmployee - represents the Employee roles with respect to the associated project. This relationship goes first through another dimension table called DimProject, then through a factless fact table called FactlessProjectResposonsibility, which represents multiple types of project roles.

  I'm using BIDS 2012, and so far I have tried defining a relationship between my fact table and ResponsibleEmployee as a many-to-many- relationship. This works, except that whenever i try to filter my project dimension based on the responsible employee attribute, it also filters the fact table directly bade on the responsible employee, so my numbers are erroneously filtered.

  It seems like what I need is a combination of a referenced relationship and a many to many relationship, but that doesn't seem to be an option in BIDS.

  I don't have edit access to the ETL process that creates the DW (It's a third party product), so my only option to modify the structure of the source DW is to tack on another ETL or used named queries in BIDS.

  Any thoughts, ideas or insight would be greatly appreciated!