Saxbi in a nutshell

The goal of Saxbi is to make it ridiculously easy to provide users access to dynamic reports based on Hyperion Essbase data using the iPad. It is meant to improve on the experience of emailing around PDF files or lugging around printouts. Saxbi accomplishes this by letting administrators create templates for reports that define which parameters a user can select from. The user then builds the report which fetches data from the Essbase server and is shown the results. In this way, it is very easy to leverage and extend data from Essbase to a mobile form factor.

Views
Views in Saxbi are like a recipe for building a report. The administrator configures a view with a particular connection to use and selections that the user can configure. Think of it this way: if you can retrieve it with Excel, you can retrieve it with Saxbi.



For example, let's say that a report that you like to view in Excel or another tool is a company sales report. The report columns are the different months of the year and the rows are the different geographical regions in your company. The point of view (POV) of the report might include things such as Year, Department, and Scenario. This would be a pretty simple report in Excel.

In Saxbi we recreate the grid from Excel and this becomes the basis of our view. Let's say that we want to let the user choose a particular Year and Scenario to view. We would setup two different selectors for this view. We can make the first selector a "Defined List" that includes the options 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. We can also make the Scenario a Defined List selector and give it the values of Actual, Budget, and Forecast.

Lastly, we also need to set what connection the view will be based on. For this Essbase view the connection is a particular cube. With all of these pieces (the View, Connection, and Selectors) uploaded to the Saxbi Server, we can now load our view.

What the user sees
With our view and its supporting pieces uploaded to the server, we're ready for our user to view the data. They login to the Saxbi Server with the Saxbi app and are presented with the list of views that they have access to. They select the new view, and are then presented with a screen for configuring selections for the views. Let's say they choose 2010 and 2011 for the years, and then Actual and Budget for the scenarios. In total they have made two selections in two dimensions for a total of four permutations.