Design and Documentation: Introducing the Visio 2007 PivotDiagram - Page 5

January 8, 2007

One last level remains in building our diagram. We will next present the Customers that are associated with each City. (Our having merged the Cities with no Customers will, as we shall see, help to present a tidier picture within this context, as well.)

Let’s say we have been asked to present Customer Addresses, versus Customer Names (the actual Customer member names within the cube). The Customer Address is one of several member properties for each Customer member. Member properties are now exposed as Categories that are available for selection, based upon the fact that we enabled their import from the PivotDiagram Options dialog earlier.

The PivotDiagram updates once again, this time reflecting the addition of the Address level.

The Addresses associated with the Cities with Customers are useful to the expressly requested presentation. Those that appear underneath the merged, customer-free Cities simply reflect member properties that exist for all Cities within the respective State’s City level, and are hence not useful within the context of our present objectives. For this reason, we will suppress the sub nodes that have appeared for the merged Cities.

The affected Cities are collapsed into a single sub node, as depicted in Illustration 30.

Next, we will perform an adjustment to make the diagram easier to understand for, say, other members of the team that do not necessarily grasp the concept of an “All” level – while taking a look at another action we can employ for similar needs, perhaps, in our own environments.

The United States (Customer Country member) assumes the top node position. Because our title specifies “SE United States,” readers can assume that the top node represents the Country level (recall that we filtered same to United States earlier). The newly compacted layout appears as depicted in Illustration 32.

We will conclude with a few minor “cleanup” details, to demonstrate more ways to enhance the presentation of our new PivotDiagram. First, we will compact spacing a bit.

The Configure Layout dialog opens.

The Configure Layout dialog appears as shown in Illustration 33.

Finally, now that design of the PivotDiagram is complete, we can remove the level names (some might prefer to leave them in place), simply as another space conserving measure.

The PivotDiagrams Options dialog appears as depicted in Illustration 34.

The adjusted layout appears as depicted in Illustration 35.

And so, we see that the new PivotDiagram has much to offer us in a way of design and documentation. I have attempted to cover many of the capabilities in the steps of this practice session. There are many other potential uses for PivotDiagrams, as well as numerous alternate ways to arrange and present the shapes involved and the information that they convey. As I put the PivotDiagram to work, together with other Visio features, I will expose relevant settings and methods in other articles of my series’.

Conclusion

In this article, we introduced and explored the PivotDiagram, which debuts in Microsoft Office Visio 2007, setting our sights upon examining its use within the context of design and documentation from the perspective of the Analysis Services environment. Our focus upon the PivotDiagram included a brief introduction to its possible uses, its components, and the data it can present. We then began a hands-on practice exercise, wherein we set up a working PivotDiagram, with a live data connection based upon the sample Adventure Works Analysis Services database.

We modified the PivotDiagram to illustrate various setting and layout options. We provided a running discussion, throughout the practice session, surrounding our work with Categories, Levels, and Nodes in the PivotDiagram, mapping each object to its peer object within the Analysis Services environment. We performed steps to add Analysis Services member properties into the new PivotDiagram, exposing them as supplementary Categories therein. Finally, we obtained some practical experience with the application of the Merge, Collapse and Promote Actions to nodes at various levels of the diagram. At relevant junctures within our construction of the PivotDiagram, we provided examples of filtering, together with suppression of objects not useful to a given presentation.

» See All Articles by Columnist William E. Pearson, III

Discuss this article in the MSSQL Server 2000 Analysis Services and MDX Topics Forum.