List vs Chart

Have you ever noticed that a list report and a chart report behave differently when it comes to querying. I found that out fairly recently. Let me give you an example of how differently the two work. Assume you are to display for each selected Month the Top Products by Sales along with the monthly % contribution towards the sales. Ideally you would drag Product, Month, Sales, Rank(Sales for Month), Total(Sales for Month) - This is the total sales for the top products, % Contribution being - Sales / Total (Sales for Month) - basically how much did this Product contribution towards the total sales. I have a rank filter - rank < = 5 with after auto aggregation property set.

Now when I drag Product, Month, and % Contribution into my Chart report and List report, I see that the values are different. The list report displays the expected value while the chart report doesn't. On closer look I notice that the chart report doesn't apply the rank prior to the calculation of Total (Sales for Month). This means that my chart is calculating the total sales across all products for the month rather than Total sales for the Top 5 products.

Now that is weird when the List and chart behave differently. To work around this, I had to create a subquery which gets me the Product, Month, Sales and Rank with filter Rank < = 5. On top of this query I have another query that does the % contribution calculation. Now the list and chart work perfectly.

In retrospection I think the chart was working as expected, the rank filter was getting applied after aggregation. It was the list that wasn't working fine even though it returned the data I required.

The point though that I would like to make here is that not always lists and charts work the same way or fire the same query.

Lists and Crosstabs

Lists and Crosstabs work differently with DMR. My requirement is to allow the user to select any member from the Product Hierarchy and the report should display the members in the selected level along with the children of each such member and the corresponding revenue.

Basically if the user selects any Product Line then the report should display Product Line, Product Type and Revenue or if the user selects any Product Type then the report should display Product Type, Product and Revenue.

I have created 2 data items for the same -

Parent - members(level([great_outdoors_company].[Products].[Products] -> ?Parent?))
Child - descendants([Parent],1)

and included Revenue measure.

When I drag the same into the crosstab the results are perfect while a list report based on the same query results in no data.

Has anyone else come across this issue?

[Update] The same can be achieved in List by creating the expressions using a Calculated Member rather than a Query Calculation. This feature is available 8.2 onwards.