What’s happening in Yellowfin? Development update

The development team is currently wrapping up work on the monthly patches to be released this week, as well as working on new features for our next major release, and assisting our support and services teams when necessary.

One of the things I have been working on this month is enhancing our functionality when connecting to OLAP data sources. In the past, OLAP reporting has been a bit hit-and-miss in Yellowfin, with a lot of our filtering and analysis functionality being unavailable. We saw the need to address this, and have come up with a number of changes to improve the OLAP reporting experience.

Enhanced filtering

The first item we addressed was filtering of OLAP reports. Previously, there were a lot of limitations on how filters could be used. We are now adding support for “In List” filtering, filtering on measures as well as dimensions, and filtering on multiple fields from the same hierarchies. Additionally, we have improved the support for cached and custom query filters as well as adding support for Yellowfin’s native numeric slider and range filter types. Access filters can now have multiple values per user – the same as normal relational sources. These changes are all being included in the Yellowfin 6.1 patch released this week.

Date manipulation

We are also currently looking at how to support some of our date/timestamp functionality for OLAP reports. Unfortunately the XML/A interface we use to connect to OLAP data sources presents some non-trivial technical problems when it comes to identifying and parsing date values. Our development team is looking at ways to get around these issues.

Future enhancements

We have a number of potential enhancements that we are looking at for OLAP reporting in the future, including calculated fields, a tree-like drill-down UI, and performance optimisations. We believe that these changes will greatly enhance the functionality and usability of OLAP reporting.