Chapter 6. Creating the Business and Presentation Layers

This chapter will cover the creation of the business and presentation layers. The business layer is where we apply various business information rules to our model. The presentation layer is what the report author will see in Report Studio, Query Studio, and Analysis Studio.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Specifying attributes

• Renaming columns

• Adding prompts

• Adding filters

• Adding calculations

• Adding formatting to data items

• Using folders and namespaces for grouping information

• Using shortcuts to include the same information in different places

By the end of this chapter, users will have created the business layer and extended the usefulness of their model by adding prompts, filters, calculations, and formatting to their model. Users will also have created the presentation layer ready to be used by report authors.

Creating the business layer

The Framework Manager modeler can make the job of the report author easier by incorporating business information rules into the model. These business information rules can be as simple as renaming the columns in the imported tables to give them more intuitive names, or setting specific formatting for the imported columns. To assist the report authors, we can add standard prompts for type-in values, and standard filters, which can be reused in many different reports. We can also add calculations so that the report author does not need to add these calculations into their reports.

Renaming columns

This is perhaps the simplest task we can perform, and is often overlooked, but is perhaps the most useful thing the modeler can do. In most imported relational databases, the column names will be in all capitals, perhaps with underlines separating the various elements of the column names. These column names do not make it obvious what the data in the column is used for....

Creating the presentation layer

Once we have completed all the modeling steps, we are ready to create our presentation layer.

The presentation layer is the layer of our framework model that is available to report authors.

Tip

Create a new namespace called Presentation Layer.

Grouping data items

The first thing we must consider while creating our presentation layer is how to create groupings of related items. For example, order lines, order headers, customers, and order items could be a group of items that logically go together; invoice lines, invoice headers, customers, and invoiced items could be another logical group. Generally, we would group together items that make sense from a business viewpoint.

Using folders and namespaces

In earlier chapters, we have looked at how to create namespaces and folders. When you want to group like data together, the use of namespaces and folders is essential.

Use folders to create logical groups; unless when you are using DMR, you will need to use namespaces...

Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at creating the business and presentation layers and making it easy for report authors by adding business information rules.

We added filters, calculations, and prompts, and set the default formatting to make our model easy to use for report authors.

Finally, we created our presentation layer by using shortcuts to existing objects rather than duplicating all the objects in our model.

We are now ready to publish our model for our report authors to use.

In the next chapter, we will look at how to create packages to publish our model for report authors to use to create their reports.