SSAS: Administrator role is not really admin!

I discovered this week an interesting bug in SSAS (both 2005 and 2008 versions). A user that was supposed to have full permission complained he can see only few members in a dimension. I checked his role and it really was defined as “Full control (Administrator)” (Checkbox in General tab of role properties). After short investigation I found that this role was in past with those limitations in members, and later the admin checkbox was selected to make this user admin on DB. So in Dimension Data tab settings were still saved,  and in fact they still were applied! I tested it in many cases and in both 2005 and 2008 versions: every time a role is edited to “Full control (administrator)”, it still applies settings of Dimension Data tab.

Someone might explain it by the famous “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”. Well, It might be nice to have an option that even admin user can limit access to members for any reason, but in this case when admin checkbox is selected, Dimension data tab becomes gray, and you cannot edit or even read it, for the simple reason that it’s not relevant now. Note that in Cubes tab there is no bug, and even if not all cubes have “read” value in Access column, admin user can browse any cube.

So the solution to my issue was to uncheck admin checkbox, select all members in this dimension attribute, and select checkbox back..