Earlier this week I got a feature request from someone someone that was looking in to my SsasHelper sample on the Microsoft SQL Server Community Samples: Analysis Services site on CodePlex. She was interested in Building a SQL Server Analysis Services .ASDatabase file from a Visual Studio SSAS Project, but pointed out that I didn’t actually *validate* a project before creating the .ASDatabase file, so if someone had checked in a project with errors, the whole process could blow up (or we might deploy a database with some issues). I looked into doing this, and it turns out it’s really easy to accomplish. I updated the code in SsasHelper sample on CodePlex to show how to do this.
The actual code is really simple:
1: bool doesBuild = false;
2: results = new ValidationResultCollection();
3:
4: // We have to provide a ServerEdition for this method to work. There are
5: // overloads that look like the will work without them, but they can't be used
6: // in this scenario.
7: // The ServerEdition might need to be changed for your situation.
8: // This can be modified to return warnings and messages as well.
9: doesBuild = database.Validate(results, ValidationOptions.None, ServerEdition.Developer);
10:
11: return doesBuild;
You can use the method I created like so:
1: Database database;
2: bool hasErrors = false;
3:
4: // Load a SSAS database object based on a BIDS project
5: database = ProjectHelper.DeserializeProject(ssasProjectFile);
6:
7: // ... Verify our project doesn't have any errors ...
8: ValidationResultCollection results;
9: hasErrors = ProjectHelper.ValidateDatabase(database, out results);
10:
11: foreach (ValidationResult result in results)
12: {
13: Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0}", result.Description));
14: }
15:
16: Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Project is Error Free? {0}", hasErrors));
17:
18: Console.WriteLine("Project validated!");
This will take a Database object and validate it to see if there are any errors. You can modify it to return Warnings and Messages as well by changing the Validation Options.
One thing to note is that the Server Edition is a required parameter. There are a few overloads of the Validate method that don’t require this parameter, but what they try and do is walk up the object tree to get the Server object (associated with the Database) and retrieve the edition. Since I’m de-serializing a project into a Database object, this property isn’t available (and can’t be set). It is important to use this method with the correct Server Edition. The validation process will throw errors if you use some (but I don’t think *all*) of the features for a different edition. For example, if your project includes Translations (an Enterprise-only feature), validation will succeed if you use ServerEdition.Developer or ServerEdition.Enterprise, but will fail if you use ServerEdition.Standard.
Cheers,
David