Can only see measures and not other fields when connecting to Pentaho/Mondrian

[Richard Mundell]

I’m playing with your XMLA Provider for Excel (v1.0.0 downloaded from SourceForge today).

I’m using it with Pentaho BI Server v5.0.7.1 (commercial edition) and Excel 2010.

I can connect to Pentaho select the Catalog and select a cube okay but the only fields I can see in Excel are the measures but none of the other fields.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Richard

[Alexandra Davidoiu (Iancu)]

Can you upgrade to 5.1? From this thread it looks like there is a problem with that particular version. Check this thread:

https://sourceforge.net/p/xmlaconnect/discussion/general/thread/0a625ed6/

[Richard Mundell]

Thanks for the reply!

I updated the Mondrian libraries to the very latest and still have the problem.

I dug a little deeper and found that Pentaho/Mondrian is actually throwing an error. It's generating invalid SQL which my database server is rejecting. If I do a packet sniff on the traffic between Excel and the app server I can see the app server is sending a error message back:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 15:37:58 GMT
Connection: close

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"> <SOAP-ENV:Header> </SOAP-ENV:Header> <SOAP-ENV:Body> <SOAP-ENV:Fault> <faultcode>SOAP-ENV:Server.00HSBE02</faultcode> <faultstring>XMLA Discover unparse results error</faultstring> <faultactor>Mondrian</faultactor> <detail> <XA:error xmlns:XA="http://mondrian.sourceforge.net"> 00HSBE02 The Mondrian XML: Incorrect syntax near ']'. </XA:error> </detail> </SOAP-ENV:Fault> </SOAP-ENV:Body> </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

Two questions:

1) Shouldn't the XMLA Provider display that error back to the user (rather than absorbing it and just failing to work properly)?

2) Is there anything that Excel and the XMLA Provider could be doing to cause Mondrian to create bad SQL? I'm guessing not (and that I've just stumbled into a Mondrian bug), but wanted to check.

[Alexandra Davidoiu (Iancu)]

1. This is correct. We added a ticket (https://sourceforge.net/p/xmlaconnect/tickets/4/) and will solve.
   2: Neither Excel nor the provider has anything to say about the way the SQL is generated.

[Richard Mundell]

Perfect. Thakns Alexandra! This software is fantastic. A wonderful contribution to the open source BI community!

[Richard Mundell]

BTW, I fixed my underlying issue by switching from the Sybase proprietary jConnect driver to the open source jTDS driver. Would still be nice if the error message made its way through to the Excel GUI though!

[Alexandra Davidoiu (Iancu)]

this is fixed in version 1.0.0.2

[WillyEckerslike]

When connecting to Pentaho/Mondrian and only measures are visible—while other fields such as dimensions, hierarchies, or attributes are missing—this typically indicates an issue with the OLAP schema configuration or user access permissions. Mondrian schemas define how data is structured for analysis of spiritual development courses, and if dimensions aren't properly defined or are excluded due to security constraints (like role-based access), they won't appear in your analysis tool.