The upcoming version of Drillbridge has some really exciting features in it. I’d like to talk about one of those features right now. Drillbridge now has support for custom functions. Drillbridge has a very powerful and flexible mapping system for easily translating between the members in your cube and related detailed data in a relational table. This is a big part of what makes Drillbridge such a compelling solution for quickly implementing drill-through.

One of the more popular functions is #removeStarting. This function strips a prefix off of a string (member name) if it has a certain prefix. For example, let’s say that the names of members in the Years dimension are FY14, FY15 and so on. You need just the numeric value in order to perform a query for the detailed data. You can use #removeStarting like this:

#removeStarting("FY", #Years)

And the value returned by the function will be 14, 15, or whatever the proper year is. The newest version of Drillbridge now supports adding custom functions by way of dropping in a Java file that contains them. This way if you have a complex mapping that needs to happen, you can use the full power of the Java language to accomplish it. For example, consider a function that needs to do special processing with respect to a combination of the year and month, in order to get a particular time value stored in a GL system.

public static int getJulianLastFromYear(String fiscalYear, String shortMonthName) {
  Integer year = Integer.valueOf("20" + DrFunctions.removeStarting("FY", fiscalYear));
  Integer month = Integer.valueOf(DrFunctions.monthToTwoDigits(shortMonthName, "en"));
  return getJulianLastOfMonth(year, month);
}

Then just compile this class as normal, drop it in the Drillbridge drivers folder, restart Drillbridge, and you can now use this function inside of your own expressions, just by calling it with whatever name you give it (in this case, it might be #getJulian).

This is a really exciting feature that will offer tremendous flexibility, particularly in cases where complex mapping is needed that might be difficult or impossible to perform with the relational database. Stay tuned – there are a few more very interesting features coming down the pike…