Easy to use Information delivery tool

Overview

Contour CubeMaker produces Contour microcubes - multidimensional databases that contain both data and metadata describing the user interface layouts. These very compact cubes can then be transferred via the Internet or attached to an email message for use in a ContourCube application providing interactive analysis and reporting.

Using Contour CubeMaker in conjunction with your ContourCube powered application allows you to create and update Web pages that provide data filtering and summarizing capabilities to a wide range of users, Windows applications for corporate users, Internet/Intranet sites with downloadable microcubes, mailing systems for report distribution.

Using Contour CubeMaker as well as Contour OLAPBrowser or your application powered by ContourCube allows you to create and easily update:

	Web pages that provide data filtering and summarizing capabilities to a wide range of users;
	Windows applications for corporate users;
	Internet / Intranet sites with microcubes for download;
	Mailing systems for report distribution.

Benefits

	Easy to use information delivery tool
	Scheduled cubes updating
	Mass microcube production
	Interactive requests for building reports

Easy to use information delivery tool

Contour CubeMaker is a command line application that requires the path to microcube generation script file and uses some optional parameters. Microcube generation script is an XML-file describing the data source settings, SQL-query and microcube template. CubeMaker processes query to the database, creates new microcube according to the template and populates it with data obtained from the SQL-query. 

Usage example: C:\CubeMaker.exe myscript.xml

If one or several parameters are specified in the script, they can be passed to the application through the command line. These parameter values are added to the SQL-query. This allows to use different filtering criteria each time you process the script. For example, you can daily produce cubes with previous day data and send them to subscribers.

Usage example: C:\CubeMaker.exe myscript.xml -d curdate

Scheduled cubes updating

With Contour CubeMaker you can easily update microcubes for users who often view their reports linked to a microcube. Contour microcubes are created in less than minutes, because instead of complicated incremental updates CubeMaker just recreates the microcubes, filling them with new data.

The use of command line parameters allows you to create microcubes containing exactly the data you need. As far as CubeMaker is a command line tool it can be run from either Windows scheduler or your custom application.

Multiple microcube production

If the script specifies a master field and an SQL-query to it, the Detail Query is filtered by each master query value; the number of microcubes built will be equal to the number of unique rows in the master query. This allows, for example, to create microcube packages that contain reports for each branch office of your company or one microcube for each quarter of current year.

Interactive request for reports generation

Your application or web page can provide users with a dialog for setting up report parameters. After this the application can generate XML-script or new parameters for existing XML script and run CubeMaker. Generated microcubes can be saved for user on a web server and shown as a link on web page or sent by email. More...

Features

	Data access through ADO, ODBC, BDE, XML
	XML script format support
	Various ways to create microcubes: -Manually -From within an application or web page -Using a scheduler
	Command line parameters can be passed to the SQL-query
	Master fields that provide rules of multiple cube production from Detail Query
	Constants CurDay, CurWeek, CurMonth and CurYear allow to fill microcubes with actual data using one script

Usage scenarios

• Website log analysis. Your script nightly adds a website log into the database. Contour CubeMaker then builds and copies 3 microcubes to the website: today's traffic, 3 last months visitors, 3 last months popular pages, last year referrers. Users get microcubes and analyze the web traffic using a web page powered with ContourCube ActiveX.
• Sales reports. Your application allows users to register sales transactions. Contour CubeMaker weekly builds microcubes: sales by regions, sales by products and so on. Users analyses sales of their company with your Windows application powered with ContourCube VCL or ActiveX.
• Report distribution to the branch offices. Your Data Warehouse collects data from company branches. Contour CubeMaker monthly produces microcubes by scripts with Master field "Branch" and your script sends microcubes containing different reports for the staff of each branch by email.