When attempting to change the connection settings on a deployed SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) package in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), you may see an “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” error when you change the Password property and attempt to save the settings:
This has been investigated by our developers and found to be a bug in SSMS. The same behavior can be observed with Microsoft components, such as the “OLE DB Provider for SQL Server Integration Services”. Note that this only affects the Password property and not other connection properties.
As this is a bug in SSMS itself, it cannot be fixed directly by CData, but there are some workarounds available:
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You can set the Password in the Other connection property. Note that this has the downside of exposing the password in plain-text:
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You can change to a different authentication scheme that doesn’t require the use of the Password connection property (provided the connector you’re using supports alternatives).
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Finally, the most robust solution is to simply change the connection in Visual Studio (which does not have the bug) and re-deploy the project to SQL Server. This takes longer, but if the project is deployed with the correct connection settings, you will not need to edit them after deployment and can avoid the bug.
Note that the above was tested in versions 18.8 and 19.3 of SSMS and may be fixed by future releases of the tool.
Please reach out to support@cdata.com if you have any questions about this.
