Reportive Designer

Overview

Reportive Designer is the tool you use to design dynamic analysis reports. It allows you to design a report and to start analyzing it instantly. The tool's Plug & Play architecture allows for easy integration of new elements that will enrich the expressive capabilities of your reports.

Reportive Designer can connect to any ODBO (OLE DB for OLAP)-compatible data cube that is available in your company.

You can use any server that comes with an ODBO driver, especially those designed to be used with PivotTables in Microsoft Excel.

Reportive Designer not only supports all Microsoft SQLServer Analysis Services (SSAS) 2005, 2008, 2008R2 servers (accessed via a network or via http/https) natively, but also local cubes. Local cubes can be generated by any tool that can generate a local cube in SSAS 2005, 2008 or 2008R2 format.

When you open the cube, the Data Explorer pane shows all dimensions and measure groups in the cube that are available to start your analysis.

This pane also allows you to create custom navigation axes such as switch axes: you can switch between axes and indicators so as to keep tables smaller, while giving Reportive Analyzer users the oppportunity to access the corresponding data.

For instance, you can replace indicator "CA (Turnover) by "% Var CA" throughout the report, allowing for analysis by value or by the percentage of change.

The Data Explorer pane also allows you to create custom formulas in case the designer of the cube has not provided you with the indicators or formulas you need.

                 Data Explorer

The formula editor has two editing modes. The simplified mode allows you to create the most commonly used business formulas.

The simplified formula editor offers a variety of common analysis functions. Thus through a simple interface you can create a "%Variation" formula that shows the evolution of sales volume according to the "calendar" time hierarchy and compared to the previous year.

                                                                                                                          Formula interface: "%Variation"

This generates the following formula:

%Variation([Measures].[Volume],[Time].[Calendar],1,year)

In MDX, the same formula would be written in the following way:

IIF(ParallelPeriod([Time].[Calendar].[Year],1) is null OR (ParallelPeriod([Time].[Calendar].[Year],1), [Measures].[Volume]) = 0, null, -1 + ([Time].[Calendar].CurrentMember, [Measures].[Volume]) / (ParallelPeriod([Time].[Calendar].[Year], 1 ), [Measures].[Volume]))

The first formulation is easier to understand and to maintain!

The formula editor also lets you define properties such as the display format or conditional formats that will be applied to all elements (e.g. changing the text color if %Var is less than zero).

The different visual elements can be used within a grid that can be subdivided at will. So you can choose to insert a series of filters and a group of tabs, then in each tab to insert tables and charts or... other groups of tabs. The report is designed to fit all screen resolutions and the elements are resized according to the height/width ratios that the designer has specified.

Simplicity first

You create a table by simply dragging and dropping. You can then select the axes and the indicators to be placed in rows or columns. Simply placing a hierarchy in a table allows you to drill into the hierarchy - even when you place several hierarchies in the table. For example, using hierarchies Geography, Products and Time in the same table table allows you to drill on all three hierarchies, allowing you to analyze data at any level.

Using hierarchies in various elements synchronizes these elements - as shown below:

                                                                           Before drilling on "Audi"

The above table and chart show the Vehicles hierarchy (with "Brand" as the current level), the Time hierarchy (with "Year" as the current level) and indicators "Volume" and "%Var" which represents the percentage of variation in volume compared to the previous year.

 
                                                                      After drilling on "Audi"

Drilling on item "Audi" has synchronized the report. The chart now shows the evolution of  sales of "Audi" models instead of the evolution of sales by brands. This applies throughout the report. You can analyze data according to different hierarchies and see the detail of sales by quarter, by month...

                                 Classic style                                                          "Coloured" style

Reportive Designer is a 100% .NET application, developed using the WPF technology. It can adapt to 32-bit or 64-bit platforms, so as to fully exploit the resources available (CPU, memory, graphics card...). Exploiting this technology makes available a range of features hitherto inaccessible and allow you to create quality dynamic reports... or extravagant ones.

Reportive Designer includes a report packaging feature. Packaging allows you to distribute the report, all its dependencies (logo, background images...), as well as the local cube (if the report is based on one).

The package thus prepared can be sent to the field for analysis. If the report is not based on a local cube, the recipient must connect to the server cube to retrieve the data to be analyzed.