Various (Non-)Ways for Hiding Trivial Members in Hierarchies

This is a link-collection that Martin has been doing when investigating, how and why the auto-hide-member of trivial members (they show a single child with the same semantics and are mostly artificially introduced to render unbalanced parent-child tress into balanced md-trees) does not work with Excel 2007 and SSAS 2008.

The Microsoft Documentation for the HideMemberIf-Property mentions the MDX Compatibility-Level of connections.

Chris Webb and Mark Russo describe how Excel 2007 overwrites the property value no matter what you specified.

There was a time when you could set the level in the registry back with SSAS 2000.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqlanalysisservices/thread/aeca1ce0-e6aa-4fdc-b604-cc0e27b7ab5a/
--> in 2005 + 2008 ist der Registry-Eintrag nicht vorgesehen

Greg Galloway hacks Excel to be content overwriting only a first fake property:
Extended Properties="MDX Compatibility=2";MDX Compatibility=2;

However, in our experiments, this rendered the whole subbranch invisible.

Oh no, we do not sacrifice so much for that functionality.