News On Qubeview's "Plugin
Architecture"
Julian Ford
has got some more news on
the new
Qubeview tool for Oracle OLAP.
"Qubeview
Desktop provides an
out-of-the-box
implementation of the Oracle
BI Beans for the analysis of
OLAP cubes and the
publication of reports to a
central repository for web
viewing. Central to the
extensible foundation of
Qubeview is a Plug-In
architecture that is
analogous to add-ins
developed for the Microsoft
Office suite of products.
Qubeview exposes a series of
programming "hooks" that
allow custom developers,
with a little Java
knowledge, to develop
stand-alone plugin (jar)
files that deliver a simple
or potentially complex
addition to the standard
functionality of the basic
product. Obvious targets for
plug-in development are web
services, workflow and
high-end analysis using the
Analytic Workspace.
To give
an example, it took about an
hour to develop a custom
"drill-through" plugin that
picks up a QDR (data
reference) from the active
cell of a Qubeview report,
parses the relevant
information, and executes a
query against the underlying
fact table to return all the
records that surmise the
value in the corresponding
cell. Another "hook" in
Qubeview allowed me to pick
up the existing connection
object and connect to the
Oracle database. The results
can then be returned to a
table, leaving the existing
dataview still open, to be
analyzed and printed. The
deployment of the Plug-In is
as simple as adding a single
line to the
plugin.properties file and
dropping the file in the
Plug-in directory. Once this
is accomplished, the
Drill-Through functionality
is available as a toolbar
icon and on the menu system.
This
approach to Business
Intelligence allows
organizations to "hit the
ground running" in terms of
getting a simple yet
powerful product that is
fully supported and
documented while allowing
custom development to meet
the specific requirements of
each department/individual.
It is planned that a library
of plug-ins will be
available for download from
Qubeview.com. The beta
release of Qubeview is
planned for the end of March
2004."
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