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Today I received a curious error in one of the OLAP cube I was working on. When trying to access it from SSAS or from a external connection in Excel, I received an error similar to what is described below:

enter image description here

'', hexadecimal value 0x1A, is an invalid character. Line 1, position 325042770. (System.Xml)

Not sure why this special character was displayed as a "->" symbol, but after exporting the error message to text I determined this it was the "SUB" character. Apparently it was a "invalid character".

I would love to "make sure that user hierarchy does not contain any invalid character.", however I don't know what the definition of that is, clearly you can't load the "SUB" character into a cube, however I'm not sure what other characters can or cannot be loaded in.

There are various claims being made about what is and is not allowed in cube dimension names, values, and descriptions. Overall however, when I look around the documentation seems very sparse, and there is not mention of the "SUB" character. In there a list of characters somewhere, or some sort of official (or non) documentation on this subject?

David Rogers
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2 Answers2

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If you still suspect that there is an issue with the data of one of the dimension attributes, you can also try to tweak this InvalidXMLCharacters attribute property:

enter image description here

vldmrrdjcc
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A coworker suggested that I validate all input against XML spec since the cubes are built on top of XML. I think something like this, will cover this character and likely several others. Probably will validate all my input characters with the following:

System.Xml.XmlConvert.IsXmlChar

Still not sure this covers ALL invalid characters in the cube, both for now it's the best I have in lieu of better documentation.

David Rogers
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