Using a date calendar
A date calendar is commonly used for users to select a date range. A calendar widget is available in many front-end reporting tools. Many reporting writers prefer to use the calendar widget because it is easy to use in the reporting tool and report users are familiar with it.
Getting ready
Dates that come from the calendar widget are typically in the form of strings, for example, 7/29/2016, which might or might not be a valid date member in the Date dimension.
In this recipe, we will show you how to format the dates from the calendar widget in the reporting tool as a valid date member and then create an MDX query to take the formatted date as a parameter.
In SSMS, if we drag any date from the Date dimension, we will see that a fully qualified key-based date member has the following format:
[Date].[Date].&[20130901]
The date representation of 20130901 tells us that any date that is passed into this query needs to be in the yyyyMMdd format.
To format the date string...
