Hi Pierre, +1 for the initiative as a whole.
One remark though to the current approach: you are creating al lot of singe Jira issues for new tables, services to load data etc. I currently do not find the functional part, for example UI elements and functionality to view the informations loaded into the datastore.
From my perspective, it does not make sense to add tables to the datamodel and services to the codebase without having a functional part depending on it.
I think it would help to maybe pick a single aspect (e.g. sales channel dimension) of the overall approch and implement all of the needed parts (database mode, service, UI and example data) for it to show what the desired outcome would be. I'm sure it would help to get the work accepted and into the codebase.
Thanks, Michael Am 27.04.19 um 13:22 schrieb Pierre Smits:
Hi All,
Currently the various business intelligence (BI) functionalities are
scattered in various components (consider all the overviews regarding
inventory positions, orders/deliveries per customer/supplier) in the
applications folder.
And on the other hand we have the BI component and the Birt component in
the plugins repo. Both of those components have minimal functionality
regarding the business intelligence aspect. But both components are
complimentary:
1. the bi (short for: Business Intelligence) component initialised the
OFBiz DWH and has secas and services for copying data from the ofbiz
database to the ofbizolap database, and
2. the birt (short for Business Intelligence Report Tool) component is
intended to deliver on functionalities to display data overviews in
various forms (tables, charts, in PDFs, UI widgets, etc)...
Unfortunately, both components lack of love from our community. But a bit
more love would significantly enhances the appeal of OFBiz for (potential)
adopters!
As a result from a customer project, I recently have been working a bit
more on the business intelligence aspect (see recent tickets in [1] and
[2]).
I believe it would be in the best interest of the project to integrate the
functionalities in the Birt component into the BI component. It will send a
clear message to both (potential) adopters and OFBiz developers (both our
contributors, and those not participating here but working on
implementations of adopters), being:
*everything related with business intelligence happens in and comes from
the bi component*.
What do you think?
When we have this, the community can start working on enhancing the single
component to increase its (and inherently OFBiz) appeal:
1. more entitiy definitions for dimension and fact tables (per [3], from
the OFBiz related books),
2. more scheduled services that move data from various ofbiz tables into
ofbizolap tables,
3. more UI widgets for displaying data aggregations (tables, charts) in
the form of portal pages widgets. These portal page widgets can then be
integrated by our adopters dynamically anywhere in the components of the
applications folder, e.g through starting/main pages.
[1]
https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20OFBIZ%20AND%20component%20%3D%20bi%20AND%20status%20not%20in%20(Closed)
[2]
https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20OFBIZ%20AND%20component%20%3D%20birt%20AND%20status%20not%20in%20(Closed)
[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471200247
Best regards,
Pierre Smits
*Apache Trafodion <https://trafodion.apache.org>, Vice President*
*Apache Directory <https://directory.apache.org>, PMC Member*
Apache Incubator <https://incubator.apache.org>, committer
*Apache OFBiz <https://ofbiz.apache.org>, contributor (without privileges)
since 2008*
Apache Steve <https://steve.apache.org>, committer
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