In our BI infrastructure we're using Excel's pivot tables to expose the data in an Analysis Service instance (the cube), and thus far we have nothing to complain about.
Excel "reports" can be defined containing pre-selected dimensions as rows, columns and filters, for example we can set the Time dimension as a column slicer, or the Country dimension as a filter slicer. This allows the users to access this pre-defined report with the slicers already in place where they just have to select there own values to slice with if needs be.
However, even tough this is working perfectly the issue emerges when we try to actually pre-define specific values in a filter slicer. These values are getting "randomly" changed after a few days without any particular pattern from what we can observe. (Note that the cube i.e. the data source is being updated daily)
For example, we want to create a report were the users would have the data already filtered by the countries Italy and France upon opening it. So we created a report where we have the Country as a filter slicer and the countries Italy and France set as specific slicers under the Country filter.
Now the problem is that this report would maintain it's structure and selected filter values for just a few days, after which Italy may get de-selected and Germany would now be selected, or only France is maintained as a slicer. And again, we can't seem to observe any particular pattern in these changes, neither the time it's taking to "lose its format", or the filter values being selected to filter with.
Furthermore, note that even tough the underlying data source is changing daily, the pre-selected values are always there and never deleted, i.e. Italy and France in this case, would always be available in the data source. In fact you could still select them in the report, even tough they are no longer selected by default.
Anyone can help us understand why this is occurring and what can be done to go around it?
EDIT Just realized that the slicer which values keeps changing every once in a while, is a column in another table. For example the Country Italy is in reality a column in a table City and therefore can be found in multiple records such as Rome, Milan etc., and then is exposed as a dimension in SSAS.
