Centrally Managing Formatting Properties in MDX Scripts

This is a quite current goody already sketched by Marc Russo:

Formatting is indeed in the twilight zone between server/analytic logic and client display issues. Originally you would want your cube to be agnostic of all that representational stuff which may change with the eye of the beholder.

On the other hand, it is unbearable to walk through the conditinal formatting result of ~100 affected measures * 30 affected reports once a formatting rule changes.

A good compromise between the "this-is-client-stuff" and the "incorporate-it-in-each-and-every-measure' is using the power of MDX scripting. The scoping approach that Marc Russo describes (and from which I learned the invaluable [Measure].CurrentMember trick) will not work, as soon as
you need to address targetted measures (such as "all currencies" or "all indexes") across calculated and real measures (an explicit measure set in a scope may only contain non-calculated measures).

So here is how it works in these cases (and similar for FORE_COLOR, BACK_COLOR, etc):

FORMAT_STRING({
 [Measures].[REAL_MEASURE_1]
 ,[Measures].[CALCULATED_MEASURE_2]
 ,...
 })=// YOUR MDX CALCULATION using [Measures].CurrentMember and returning a format string
 ;