In my current environment, we build and deploy our solution to our dev box. Once tested, we migrate the MSAS database by exporting out the .XMLA and run it on our stage box and finallly to production.
When making changes due to business requirements or such, I want to use the schema that is in production as a baseline so that we do not lose any of our partitions. I tried using the Open Analysis Services option in Visual Studio, but that just exposes the Analysis Services database on Production, thus any changes would directly affect production.
I want to be able to bring this information into Visual Studio and then go through the normal process of promotion (build and deploy on dev, stage, then prod).
I tried to read in the .xmla file as an existing item, but it does not work.
Any help would be appreciated.