Deep Inside the Essbase Java API - Developing Essbase Applications - page 297

8.7 memBer inFormation
It may be needless to say, but Essbase members play a pivotal role in every Essbase
application. After all, the very structure of the database is determined by the mem-
bers it contains. Essbase members also are highly configurable because they have many
properties that determine how the data is physically stored within the database, how
users interact with the database, or even how the Essbase members interact with each
other inside the database. Due to the important role that members play, all Essbase APIs
over the history of the product have featured the ability to query, and even manipulate,
the members. With each major new version of Essbase, new features have been added
that affect members and that affects how you can work with them. This section will
help you understand the different methodologies you can use to get information about
Essbase members, the benefits and costs of each methodology, and the pitfalls you may
encounter.
There are a couple of primary ways to work with Essbase member information.
The first methodology we are going to discuss is an object-based methodology that pro-
vides a fully qualified member object in the form of the IEssMember interface. The
IEssMember interface makes it fairly easy to examine different properties of a member.
Further, you can create new members and modify the Essbase database outline using
the IEssMember interface. The downside of using IEssmember objects is that they are
fairly heavy objects, so they generally have increased memory and processing require-
ments, particularly in large outlines. The other downside is that there are a number of
ways to obtain an IEssMember object, but not all IEssMember objects are created equal.
Depending on how you get the IEssMember object, certain properties may not be avail-
able and will actually throw an exception if you try to access them. We will discuss
several methods of obtaining members, the problems you may encounter with each and
strategies for getting the information you need.
The second methodology we will discuss uses an outline member query that returns
a delimited string containing just the member information you request. The benefit of
this technique is that it is blazingly fast. on the downside, only certain properties are
available using this technique, and it is poorly documented. This technique also requires
some string manipulation for processing the results.
As with everything in the Java API, it will be easier to understand these points after
you have see some of the code examples. Let us start by looking at Essbase member
objects.
8.7.1 Accessing Essbase Member Information via IEssMember Objects
The most common way to get information about Essbase members via the Essbase
Java API is to get an IEssMember object. An IEssMember object contains all of the
properties and settings that Essbase administrators are used to seeing in the EAS
member Properties dialog box. These properties include the name, consolidation and
data storage properties, along with the aliases, attributes, and user-defined attributes
(uDAs).
once you have an IEssMember object , it is very easy to call a method to get the mem-
ber property you want, keeping in mind that not all IEssMember objects completely
describe the object (Figure 8.4). In this section, we will use the following method call to
print out some of the member properties. If the property is not available, it will print the
exception message returned by the Java API.