[SoC] SoC Report: Geo-BI dashboards

[Etienne Dube]

Hi everybody,

1. What did I do this week:

- Fixed the display of GeoJSON features in OpenLayers. Turns out that 
the GeoJSON response from the server must have the content-type set to 
"text/plain", otherwise the response will be an invalid XmlDocument 
object that can't be parsed by OpenLayers.Format.GeoJSON (which expects 
a plain string).
- More work on the servlet component. The cell values corresponding to 
spatial members and member names are now present as attributes in the 
returned GeoJSON features.
- I have begun the implementation of thematics. This is handled by the 
client (in JavaScript), using OpenLayers.Style objects. For now it is 
possible to manually specify classes (intevals) and colors, defined in 
an array. I will add support for equal intervals later.
- Had a discussion with my mentor (Thierry Badard), about various topics 
such as the way to handle the map display in accordance to the 
row/column disposition of the OLAP result set, thematic mapping styles 
to be supported (choropleth, proportional symbols and pie charts) and 
what data are to be exchanged between the client and server. This 
cleared up a few gray areas.

2. What do I plan on doing next week:

- Implement a MDX query control on the client side, in order to submit 
custom queries to the servlet (and replace the hard-coded ones).
- Begin adding additional data needed for titles and tabular displays to 
the servlet's response (in addition to the GeoJSON features).
- Begin implementing basic Spatial OLAP operators such as drill-down.

3. Am I blocked on anything:

No, everything is going smoothly now and I'm making good progress. 
OpenLayers is a joy to work with, kudos to the developers. I can also 
say the same about Mondrian and the olap4j API, which is easy to use and 
cleanly designed.

Have a nice weekend,

Etienne