Update April 2017: wIth the launch of the Acterys Platform a more versatile and powerful platform is available that includes out of the box all Microsoft platform development tools that that typically offer a way more comprehensive feature set than Jedox.
In this post I would like to share my view on few challenges I faced by embarking on a project powered by Jedox, which incorporated writing of several thousand lines of code (macro):
1. Editor Simplicity: Jedox is more geared towards business users providing the functionality they require as a BI product, than providing functionality for the developers to write better code. No problems, I guess they do best at what they deliver, and for the solutions area I have made out a way where I can leverage the same old friend’s of developer tools such as Eclipse for PHP (Macro) development.
2. Code Re-use: This was a major roadblock for me until I figured out a way to achieve the building of complete application styled solution for the projects delivered by Jedox. As when you write macro, it is encapsulated in its own shell, so if you want to achieve the same functionality for multiple spreadsheets (which is written once and used multiple times across spreadsheets) in the native installation of Jedox its hard to achieve, unless you expose out a single piece of functionality making tweaks to the “macro_engine_config.xml” file as mentioned in their admin manual.
Solution:
The magic bullet to resolve all and more issue as mentioned above and you may face, following illustrates a way , which helped me big time to write better code is as follows:
1. Create a folder “shared_macro” or any name you like, which will be the entry point for your macro based application, nested sub folders and php files representing macros (comprising your application) all can be created and referenced relatively beneath this folder. This is the folder which will be configured with Jedox to represent the entry point for your custom code.
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Jedox\Jedox Suite\httpd\app\shared_macro”
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Jedox\Jedox Suite\core\macro_engine_config.xml”
to reload the configuration.
That’s it , now Jedox can peek into this folder and utilize any php based files as macros, how to achive it is as follows:
– Create a file inside the folder created in the step 1 above as “dummy.php”, with the code content as follows:
That’s easy enough to achieve as well :
First download the eclipse package and install the necessary software as illustrated,
Once the project is successfully created, then attached the “shared_macro” folder as follows: