CalculatedMeasures in Flex OLAP

I wrote a small sample which shows how a Custom Aggregator can be written and used to simulate a Calculated measure in Flex OLAP. Of-course, this solution may not work for all requirements but can be used atleast in some scenarios. The source is here.

Custom Aggregator sample for Flex OLAP

Here is a sample which shows a percent custom aggregator used for OLAP. The sample shows computation of percentage of values to the total value. The total value is assumed to be known before hand.

The PercentAgg class implements the IOLAPCustomAggregator interface. The constructor takes the total value as input and uses it to compute the percentage of values in the computeEnd and computeObjectEnd functions.

The sample also shows how OLAPAttribute class can be extended to OLAPTotal to replace the "(All)" value with a custom name "Total".

The sample also shows how OlapDataGrid can be created in AS and itemRendererProviders can be supplied to it and values displayed in ODG can be styled. Here is the complete source.

Writing a Custom Aggregator for Flex OLAP

Writing a custom aggregator for OLAP involves implementing the IOLAPCustomAggregator interface. It is easy to write a custom one based on the default ones. The default SUM, AVARAGE, MIN, MAX and COUNT aggregators source can be found in the mx.olap.aggregators directory.

The SUM, MIN, MAX and COUNT aggregators are all simple and acutally doesn't require any special handling as they are linear. The AVARAGE aggregator is special because avarage of avarages wouldn't give the correct result and hence we need to maintain proper information to arrive at the correct result.

The following sample shows how this is achieved.

IOLAPCustomAggregator has 6 functions can they can be divided into two sets.

1. computeBegin,computeLoop and computeEnd. These functions are called to initialize, compute and return the simple aggregation value.

Suppose 1..8 are the input values and they need to avaraged as two different sets 1..5 and 6..8. The sequence of function calls is one computeBegin, one or many calls to computeLoop and one call to computeEnd. 1. computeBegin can be used to prepare for a fresh computation. 2. computeLoop is the place where the acutal computation takes place. This function would get called repeatedly to add new input values to the aggregation. 3. computeEnd is supposed to return the value of the computation. This is called when cube decides that no new input values would get added to this aggregation and it is ready to receive the final value.

2. computeObjectBegin, computeObjectLoop, computeObjectEnd. These functions are called to initialize, compute and return the aggregation of aggregations.

The second set of calls would be, one call to computeObjectBegin, one or many calls to computeObjectLoop (depending on the number of aggregated values) and one call to computeObjectEnd.

As shown in the image these functions are supposed to compute the avarage of avarages. As the first set of functions saved the sum and count values separately the task is easy. We need just compute the sum of both these values from each avarage object.

In computeObjectBegin the first value to start the computation is passed. In computeObjectLoop the the computation is carried forward with additional values. In computeObjectEnd the result of the computation should be returned. Hope this helps!