Evolution of Essbase: new URL-based drill-through showed up in 11.1.1.3

Continuing on with the idea of getting insight into the Essbase feature set over time, as viewed through the lens of its Essbase Java API evolution, you can quite clearly see that the open/URL-style drill-through (as opposed to classic LRO-based drill-through) showed up in version 11.1.1.3, which in fact is pretty much the only thing that seemed to get added to this particular release, Java API-wise, along with some ancillary drill-through methods/functionality in some related classes.

More near to my heart: this is the exact functionality that paved the way for Drillbridge! Although it wasn’t available as a feature on day 1, subsequent versions of Drillbridge gained the ability to automatically deploy drill-through definitions to a given cube, and it uses exactly these API methods to accomplish it.

New webpage for Essbase Java API evolution

A fair bit of my job is dealing with and building solutions around the Essbase Java API. For many years, the Java API has been the premier way to programmatically work with Essbase (compared to say, the C and VB APIs, which have fallen out of favor). As part of this development work, it’s often important to see when (in terms of version) a certain class, method, interface, or other object has been added, modified, removed, or deprecated.

As a bit of a side project, I have been working with a library for comparing Java JARs to each other (japicmp). By processing and interpreting the results of just about every single Essbase Java JAR from 7.0.1, through the 9.x series, multiple 11.x’s, and finally to version 12.2.x, I have come up with something of a master table that shows all of these changes. You can view the initial results of the Essbase JAPI JAR evolution analysis. I’ll probably refresh this and enhance the output as new library versions become available or as I determine that additional insights become useful.

Screenshot from the Essbase Java API evolution analyzer

Continue Reading…