Oracle OLAP – MindMapping

A number of years ago I wrote a simple utility for exporting OFA hierarchies into the popular open source mind mapping software FreeMind. Because the maps it creates are essentially not very different to a graphical representation of information in a hierarchical structure, they are a natural fit to document OFA hierarchies. One of it’s great advantages is that, being open source software, the FreeMind format is open and therefore anyone can see the structure and create maps. The format is straightforward XML that is well structured and intuitive.
Over the years I have used this excellent piece of software for many applications, and it has always struck me that there was more potential for using it as a means of documenting OFA, and other OLAP systems. So I finally got round to creating a generic mechanism for outputting information from OFA into a FreeMind mindmap. At the moment I have created 2 suites of Express code for use in OFA

1. A suite of generic programs and OFA objects; dimensions and FDIs. Once the FDIs are correctly populated, with any required information, a single program call will generate a FreeMind mindmap from the FDIs.
2. A suite of programs that populate the generic OFA objects with the necessary information to create a FreeMind mindmap from any hierarchy

Having completed this exercise, it should now be reasonable straightforward to replicate the functionality for Oracle OLAP Analytic Workspaces.
As a teaser here is a screenshot of an OFA hierarchy in FreeMind including some additional formatting and information displayed in small ‘tables’ attached to each node:

An OFA hierarchy exported to FreeMind with formatting

I am currently completing the documentation for this and will make the utility available in a few days.

Explore posts in the same categories: OFA Technical, Oracle OLAP Technical