Well, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. I scaled back the plan for 1.3.2 a little bit and just polished up the things that were done. This release has some interesting but modest updates. Here’s the exact feature list from the release notes:

• New function: rightMinusStarting
• New function: leftMinusEnding
• New function: monthToTwoDigits
• Tables are now enhanced with Data Tables for formatting and other awesome functionality
• Paging is back!
• Interior of HTML table is very performance sensitive — might need to now generated inline

Left/Right starting/ending functions

So, a few things are going on here. There are a couple of new convenience functions. What do you do if you need the right 8 characters of a 10 character string, for example? Usually you need to take the length of the whole string, subtract out the length of the prefix, blah blah blah, it’s annoying. The new leftMinusEnding function is a convenience function that gives you the left characters in the string MINUS the ending N characters. And similarly for the rightMinusStarting function. This will be a simpler way to deal with stripping a prefix off that’s a certain length. So let’s say the member name in your outline is Loc_1000 and you just need the “1000” for your query. You could do #rightMinusStarting(#Location, 4) to get just ‘1000’. And if the string was 1000_Loc then you could do #leftMinusEnding(#Location, 4) to get ‘1000’. Simple but useful.

#monthToTwoDigits function

Wait a second, don’t we already have this? Sorta. This new function with a shorter name is locale aware. This should come in handy for people in German, French, and any other locales to be able to translate month names in your language to a digit. Also, this function combines translates for both short month names and long month names. So let’s say the outline contains “März” (German for the month of March). We can now use the new function like this:

#monthToTwoDigits(#Time, 'de')

In this case I’m assuming that #Time is your time dimension with month names in it. “de” is the locale code for German (Deutsch), so this function will return a value of ’03’. Not that this function as with all others returns a string value, but you can use it numerically.

DataTables

The “DataTables” library is now used to make the formatting of the table even nicer.

Paging is back!

The paging functionality is leveraged from the DataTables functionality in order to provide paging. Note that paging is NOT multiple requests to the database to get the rows needed – Drillbridge always executes a query that returns all rows and the paging that occurs is entirely within what the web browser shows. Paging is a per-report option that can be on or off.

Better performance with tons of rows

The code that generates the table itself has been rewritten. I did a lot more testing with larger datasets and couldn’t believe how much it could bog down with lots of rows. I did some testing with a 600,000 row result set and in my case the data itself takes 29 seconds to pull from the database server. Before, the table would take ages to show up, if at all. Now it renders in a second. There are a few performance issues that you run into in the web browser with this much data, but that just is what it is.

Towards 1.3.3

Like I said, this release has a little less than what I wanted – I still have some cool things in store for subsequent releases, but philosophically I would like to release early and release often. So instead of doing so much work that it takes an extra month or two and then is a bigger change/version, I’d like to do incremental releases. For those of you providing feedback on the forums and email, thank you again so much. I am still tracking every single suggestion that has been made and still plan to address those items when time permits. In the coming weeks I’ll get the development plans/roadmap out and more public so you can see what’s in store, but for now just keep that feedback coming and let me know if you hit any snags.

As always, Drillbridge is available in the downloads section.