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ActivePivot managers, schemas and cubes can be described by using fluent builders, which allows you to configure everything with concise and readable Java code. These builders follow the same principles as the Datastore fluent builders:
  • Multiple interfaces guide (e.g. code completion in IDE) the developer through the configuration steps.
  • There is a de-facto compile-time consistency check of what the developer does.
The StartBuilding class contains all the methods to start building any object with the fluent builder interfaces, including the datastore builders. A given cube description contains several elements, either mandatory (e.g. cube dimensions & hierarchies) or optional (e.g. some of the shared context elements).

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Manager, Schemas and Cubes

Any ActivePivot application needs an ActivePivot Manager that hold a reference to an OLAP “catalog” of the cubes exposed to remote clients, and (for internal purpose) also holds references to one or multiple “schemas” (fact model definition) and underlying “cubes” (where those facts contribute). From a high-level perspective, here is a very minimal example of ActivePivot manager configuration…
You may have noticed that in the above description neither the manager nor the schema have names, and we didn’t even explicitly configure a catalog… There are methods to choose names for managers, schemas and define catalogs, but if one doesn’t choose to use them then the builder will use some default names (i.e. “Manager”, “Catalog” and “Schema”) and include in the catalog all the cubes that have been configured. In the above example we chose to explicitly define the fields of the selection (a.k.a. the fact model)… But the fluent builder comes with convenient shortcut methods to help create your selections much faster. Hence, you can now simply create a selection that consist of dozens of fields automatically “denormalized” from a given Datastore mode, with for instance:
The javadoc of com.activeviam.desc.build.ISelectionDescriptionBuilder provides an API that can be used to simply create your selections. For the catalog, if you don’t declare one, one will automatically be created, containing all cubes and called “Catalog”. Additionally, the containingAllCubes() method of the catalog builder is an easy way to just change the name of the single Catalog containing all the cubes (this one appears in UIs as opposed to the manager and schemas names). As another example, here is a slightly more comprehensive configuration of an ActivePivot manager:

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Cube Configuration

A cube description can be simply built with the following code:
This is the shortest cube description one can have. This cube will have a single dimension with a single hierarchy containing a single level and only have the native measures. Of course your project will usually have multiple measures and dimensions, customize the aggregate provider, and will more look like:
Some partial aggregate providers in this example are filtered. These filters can be applied on any level of the cube, regardless of whether the level is handled by the provider or not. This allows partials providers to only load a slice of the data in the cube. You will note that in this description the list of dimensions and measures are given by a separate function. That allows you to split it in multiple blocks/beans when you have hundreds of dimensions and measures in your cube. These functions can also call more functions, adding blocks of dimensions and measures, to allow measures and dimensions declarations to be grouped or split at will.

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Aggregation Functions

There are several ways to create aggregated measures based on raw values as shown below. The first method uses core aggregation functions (sum, min, max, avg) as specific method names on a named schema field.
The second method uses core aggregation functions (longSum, shortSum, squareSum) as specific method names after the schema field is given.
The third method uses the plugin key for the aggregation function, whether it’s a custom aggregation function or a core aggregation function.

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Copper

Additional measures and hierarchies can be defined through the Copper API.