The Essbase Administration Services console has an ostensibly nice feature: custom views. Instead of having to navigate from the top of the hierarchy down to the thing you want to see, you can create a custom view at a lower level in the navigation tree. This is a custom view and it gets its own tab along with the normal enterprise view.

So… nice feature in theory. I used it a few times but now never really mess around with it. This is probably more to do with the fact that I jump in and out of a multitude of environments much more quickly these days than I ever used to.

In any case, it’s clear that EAS stores this setting in a database and on the server. This is also nice in theory because it means the settings you set aren’t locked to a particular machine and that you’d have to set everything back up if you ever installed EAS elsewhere. The console, however, takes its sweet time relaying your settings up to the server, though. In fact, it waits until you exit to sync things up.

In a perfect world, I am opening up EAS, doing what I need to do, then closing it right away. And perhaps this is how the creators envisioned it being used. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and I have a tendency to leave EAS and many other programs open indefinitely. For one reason or another I might lose my network connection and connection to EAS. Then I want to exit EAS, which is EXACTLY when it wants to talk to the EAS server… which it can’t. And EAS gleefully tells me that it can’t save my custom views. Even if I don’t have any. Which I don’t (see above).

Every time.

As a software developer this absolutely kills me on several levels. One being why don’t we just relay the preference at the time it’s set rather than on exit (which statistically is a very likely time for not having a connection to the server). Two, when I want to close a program I generally want to close-it-n0w-thankyouverymuch. Finally, three, there’s nothing I can do about the lack of setting saving going on anyway – so just silently log it, if you must, shut up, and shut down.

As I said, this is pedantic, but that’s the very definition of the notion behind this papercuts: no single one is bad but put together… ugh.

While I’m at it, a fresh coat of paint on EAS wouldn’t kill anyone either. Actually, last time I looked under the hood a bit I noticed that EAS was using some pluggable “LAF” (look and feel) architecture and I was able to tweak the colors a bit, away from “Interdimensional Irrelevance Grey” and “Low Block Density Cyan” but it’s been awhile since I played with things…