Introduction
This BLOG is based offf the XMLA for analysis tool available on SDN at http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/com.sap.km.cm.docs/library/uuid/6275d190-0201-....Recently, I did a few webinars on this topic. See these presentations:
Web Services within SAP NetWeaver 2004s BI - Create, Discover, and Consume! (PDF 1.7 MB)
Consuming a BI Web Service via the Portal – a Practical Application (PDF 1.6 MB)
Simple MDX Tool
The reason I'm writing this blog is that I don't think people ever understood the value of the code samples delivered in this tool because the samples don't render your BI Data. Therefore, I modified this tool such that you can enter your own XMLA web service and MDX Statements at runtime in this application and it will render your BI Data in an HTML Table!
Why use this?
There are a number of articles and BLOGs on why Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture is the best way to go. In this case, we can use this web service to pull back BI data and combine it with data from other applications. This html application can sit on the SAP NetWeaver platform or can integrate with any other platform! Recently, I did a call for the ASUG community that described the XMLA web service and QUERYVIEWDATA web service from BI. Both of these web services allow you to utilize BI Data. In this blog I'll discuss using the XMLA web service in a 3rd party application. In the next blog, I'll discuss using the QUERYVIEWDATA web service.What does it look like?
How do you implement it?
It's actually very easy to implement. The first step is to download the XMLA for Analysis tool and save this to a folder on your computer. Let's assume this location is "C:xmla". All you need to do is build an html file in the same folder "C:xmla" with the following source code:One thing to keep in mind is there is a line in this source code that is flagged as "'textarea" where you will need to remove the single quote and make it "textarea". This is due to the formatting in the SDN blog utility.
To use it, all you need to do is replace the XMLA web service with your own xmla web service and replace the MDX statement with any MDX Statement. If you need help writing MDX, you can use transaction MDXTEST in your BI system to help generate some sample MDX statements. This html application can run anywhere. It can be on the SAP NetWeaver Application server, or on a user's desktop.
Summary
This tool is just one simple example of how you can consume BI Data in external applications. You can consume this web service in any external application that can consume web services!
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