[SoC] SoC report: Geo-BI dashboards

[Etienne Dube]

Hi everybody,

1. What did I do this week:

- Completed the drill-down (drill replace) and roll-up (roll up by 
level) OLAP navops in the client app (toolbar, selection, click 
handling, ...) and servlet (logic for calling the MDX query transforms). 
It works!

- Fixed some performance issues with the snowflake schema I'm using for 
the geographic dimension in my data warehouse (PostgreSQL+PostGIS DBMS). 
I replaced some views with tables and got almost a 10x speed improvement 
when retrieving geographic members in GeoMondrian.

- Added logging and debugging code to the servlet, using log4j (I used 
this to diagnose the speed issues, as explained above).

- Fixed minor issues:
   - Fixed a problem related to non-unique member names in the Mondrian 
cube schema
   - Fixed a bug occuring when submitting MDX queries containing 
non-ASCII characters (e.g. accents like in member [Québec]). In IE or 
Firefox < 3.0 these weren't transmitted as UTF-8 sequences; putting the 
right content type and character encoding in the XmlHttpRequest (via 
dojo.xhrPost) fixed it.

- Interacted quite a bit with my mentor for testing (he's good for 
stumbling on bugs that somehow elude me ;) ).

- Cleaned up and fully documented pretty much all of my code (Java 
servlet, JavaScript client and olap4j contribution).

- Contributed the experimental MDX query transformation package to the 
olap4j project (see 
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=2081316&forum_id=577988 ).

2. What do I plan on doing next week:

- Implement equal intervals styling for the choropleth maps.
- De-uglify the test page.
- Prepare a test data package (for populating the PostgreSQL+PostGIS 
data warehouse) to distribute along the first release (I still have to 
check if it's possible with my current test cube, due to copyright and 
licensing issues.)
- Document the installation procedure.
- Settle on a license for the initial release, and think of a catchy 
name for the project!
- Set up a public demo page.
- If I have enough time, try working on other thematic mapping styles 
(pie charts, bar graphs...) and various widgets on the client part 
(legends and so on).
- Tarball the whole thing and unleash it upon the masses.
- Have a beer and go cycling (I miss the outdoors... luckily it's been 
raining all the time for the last few weeks so I'm not feeling too bad 
spending all my days inside).

(whew that's a lot to do...)

3. Am I blocked on anything:

- No, I'm on track for a first release by August 18th.

Have a nice weekend, and a good last coding week to my fellow GSoCers!

Etienne