Using Ado Md and Office Web Components to Generate Thin Client Charts and Pivottables from Olap Cubes

Using ADO MD and Office Web Components to Generate Thin Client Charts and PivotTables from OLAP Cubes When faced with a problem of browser incompatibility for embedded components, most programmers are eager to roll up their sleeves and begin implementing server side components with similar functionality. This article is an effort to describe a way of processing the Chart and PivotTable Components on the server side to present a thin client interface for OLAP cubes. I will discuss techniques that connect Office Web Components (OWC) to an OLAP server and issue simple MDX queries via ADO MD (ActiveX Data Objects for Multidimensional Data) to generate Charts and PivotTables that can be exported as images embedded in a HTML page. Sample Application We shall be using the following technologies in our sample application: Active Server Pages Microsoft OLAP Office Web Components ADO MD and MDX The above screen-shot is from the sample application that I will use to illustrate the various techniques throughout this article. This application uses a multidimensional data cube called Sales on an MS OLAP server to do the data analysis of a fictitious toy manufacturing company called Fun School. The Sales cube is made up of three Dimensions, Product, Customers, Time, and three Measures, Sale, Cost and Quantity. We will fetch data from the OLAP cube to generate a PivotTable view and a graph in a web server's memory and then generate graphical images based on the PivotTable's view using the OWC components for a browser based data analysis. For those of you who are new to the OLAP and multidimensional database analysis concepts, the following couple of sections will give you a brief overview of these technologies. Since an in-depth discussion on these technologies is beyond the scope of this article, it is recommended to check out the URLs mentioned at end of this article for further reference. About MS OLAP Microsoft