Strange ASO Update Behavior

We recently had a customer report an issue when writing back to an ASO database through Dodeca.  The issue involved writing back #Missing to cells that previously had a value.  Whenever the data was retrieved, the cell did not have a missing value, but rather the cell returned 0.   They also reported that updating the same cells using the classic Excel add-in behaved exactly the same way.   As it misbehaved in the classic add-in as well, we recommended to the customer that they file a service request with Oracle.

Today we heard the result from Oracle Tech Support:

“This is the expected behavior when you load #Missing cells through Excel Add-In or SmartView into an ASO application. The load operations through Excel Add-In loads data into an incremental slice using override mode. In this mode when you load #Missing values into cells that already have a non-missing value, they will be replaced with 0 values.“

Not many companies are writing back to ASO at this time and I wasn't yet aware of this behavior, but now we now another one of the limitations of ASO writeback.