Release 2.6.1

Today we uploaded the next release of instantOLAP on our server. Version 2.6.1 is more than a service release, it also contains a number of nice frontend and backend features and improvements.

You can download the version from our downloads page. You will also find a update of our manual, reference and online documentation on our documentation page. Read this article to learn some details about version 2.6.1 and to read its release notes.

New features

Improved renderers

The new version contains new and faster renderers for the HTML, Excel and PDF output. In difference to the output of the PDF renderer, which generates output equal to its previous version, the HTML renderer now generates a much more compressed result. Especially for the Internet Explorer, this reduces the load and display time for HTML reports significant.

Additionally, the new HTML renderer offers some new formatting options:

• Scrollable tables with fixed headers: Before in the only available in the analyzer, tables in normal reports can now also contain fixed headers and scrollbars. The new HTML renderer will automatically display every table as scrollable table which is placed inside a block with fixed width and height properties set.
• Free positioning of blocks: For each block you may assign a fixed X/Y position and place them everywhere on the screen you want to.
• The automatic expansion of blocsk to make them all equal with can be manually switched of now.
• Charts are now automatically expanded to the size of their owning blocks and therefore zoomed when blocks are expanded because of other and larger blocks in the report.

The Excel renderer also contains some new features. E.g. automatically generates foreground and background colors for negative numbers or exceptions are now included in the Excel export and all original datatypes of the cells are preservered when exporting a document.

Print preview

The report viewer now contains a new „Print preview“ button which shows the report in a printable PDF version directly inside the browser. This allows to print a report without exporting it into the PDF format before. To use this feature, your browser must have installed the Adobe PDF plugin.

Hideable explorers

A new button in the upper right corner of the portal allows to hide the explorer bar at the left side of the portal and to gain more space for the reports or other viewers.

Improved expression editor

The expression editor, which is used e.g. to edit formulas or header iterations in the Analyzer, has widely changed and offers a number of new dialogs for searching, sorting, navigating etc. in dimensions without using the keyboard and manually typing expression.

There is a detailled description of the expression editor in our also new manual for the version 2.6.1.

A new storage model for stores

When creating a store you can now choose between two storage models for their data: The known „Condensed“ format and the new „Indexed“ format, which is much fast in building high-dimensional stores but slower in reading data out of stores. With a good combination of condensed and indexed stores, you can now create offline version of really high dimensional cubes by creating the most used combination of dimension as condensed stores and additionaly storing the „complete“ view of the cube in a indexed store.

To learn more about the new storage type, read the new store property description in our new reference for version 2.6.1.

Release Notes

22.10.2009: Release 2.6.1

Server

• A new function ISLEAF was added
• Less logging, e.g. for unknown tables while editing configurations
• Now match filters for cubes can contain expressions of any complexity
• Imported dimensions now use less memory and CPU than before
• The limits for number keyloader have been lowered, both limits can be negative now and the start-limit has no longer to be less than the end-limit
• Unknown keys are now mapped to the root key when loading a cube into an offline store (but they still generate warnings). This brings the behavior closer to online cubes, because the root key of dimension always reflect the total of the database content, independent of all keys being mapped to the dimension.
• A new storage model for stores, the „Indexed“ storage, allows to create stores for high-dimensional cubes. Though the indexed storage is slower than the previous „condensed“ model, its build time does not grows exponential with the number of included dimensions.
• Line breaks in escaped SQL statements (@“…..“) are now allows and will no longer irritate the Database server.
• Unmappable keys are mapped to the root key of a dimension when loading a cube into a store. This equals the root value of the dimension to the online version of the cube.

• Bugfix: A possible deadlock while using a corrupt dimension was fixed
• Bugfix: Mappings with „mode = select“ did not appear in the result sometimes
• Bugfix: Multiple mappings for the same fact now also work with DLOOKUP
• Bugfix: The GROUP BY clause was constructed wrong if a statement contained
  equal expressions and used the „Group by indices“ option.

Web-Frontend

• New and faster renderers for HTML, Excel and PDF output
• A strong compression for the HTML output was added, now cells with similar styles are clustered into CSS classes
• A new „Print preview“ was added to the report viewer now. The preview displays reports as PDF files inside the portal and allows to print reports without exporting them before.
• User can now hide the explorers at the left side of the portal
• Now ThinUsers can also delete their private files and snapshots
• Now negative numbers are also colored red when exported to Excel
• New placeholders for filenames in automations have been added (%USER% etc)
• Empty rows and columns are now removed from the result set and no longer displayed as rows or columns with the height or width 0
• Input fields and links became much more performant, reports with thousands of input fields are now possible
• Assertions are now also displayed in Excel and PDF exports
• The selected tab in the tabbed orientation is now highlighted
• Dialogs are movable now
• Window titles are limited to 30 characters now
• Improved drag and drop behavior which now also works if the user drags an item very fast or if the browser reacts slowly
• The table editor in the Pivot viewer does no longer disappear when changing the format to „chart“.
• The „save as“ dialog now also shows where the user has no write access if one of the subfolders is accessible.
• The Excel export now preserves the data types and exports all texts as text, even if it is convertible to a number.
• There is no need to create access rules for the bookmarks or snapshots folder any more.

• Bugfix: Headers nested under spanned headers are now no longer too wide or too heigh
• Bugfix: The snapshot and automation folders no longer need manual set access rights
• Bugfix: The font-color was not exported to Excel correctly
• Bugfix: Removing sorts in the Analyzer now works
• Bugfix: Like for other formats, the XML export is now only offered after the report was displayed
• Bugfix: Long URLs caused problems in IE and are now replaced by simple numbers
• Bugfix: EMail attachments always had „.pdf“ extension when send directly out of the report viewer.
• Bugfix: Sorting a row or column in the pivot viewer (using the context menu of a header) now also works with scrolled tables.
• Bugfix: The content of search selectors and input fields can now be selected.

Workbench

• The Workbench no longer locks when waiting for a model load or reload
• The ERM view became faster and uses a cached version of the database-schema when displaying the links
• Invisible keys and facts now appear in the cube editor
• Invisible dimensions now appear in the dimension preview
• A new background property was added for queries
• The column widths in the property editor are no longer reset when a new element is selected
• The previewer now also works on all Windows 64 bit systems

• Bugfix: The password for automations can now be edited and changed

Console

• A new argument now allows to kill an existing session for a named user