About the Solution

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Most businesses sell something, whether it is a physical product or a service. Information about these sales is commonly captured in a core business system for invoicing and shipping purposes; however, that information also has a critical influence on marketing, sales, and product development decisions. The IT groups in such companies are often called on to provide summary reports of sales information. Typically users want these reports in an electronic format so that they can perform further analysis or reporting. OLAP and web technologies provide an extremely attractive mechanism for responding to these requests.

The solution in this chapter is a preliminary version of a web-based sales analysis and reporting system. I call it a "preliminary" version because you will probably want to enable many other features in your solution. However, the techniques illustrated by this solution are the ones developers commonly ask me about, and they are often the key to knowing how to implement other features as well. This solution allows users to quickly analyze data stored in a multidimensional data source, save reports they create and reload them later, and view their data in either the PivotTable control or the Chart control. Users can choose to use an online OLAP server or an offline cube file, and they can reload reports in either case. This solution also shows how to implement a useful feature not built in to the first release of the PivotTable component: top/bottom N filtering.