Using Silverlight TreeView to Display BI Dimension

Introduction

In business intelligence (BI) dimensions provide a natural way to browse business measures, such as sales volume, profit, etc. For example, information consumers might want to view sales volume broken down by Product Dimension Hierarchy and have an ability to drill from its top level, let’s say, Category to the bottom or leaf level that might be called Item. In our case drilling is possible due to structure of the Product Dimension Hierarchy that consists of two levels, Category and Item. The entities of each level are called dimension members. Here are some examples of the Category level members: Beverages and Produce. Examples of the leaf level members could be Chai and Pears.

In BI applications dimensional hierarchies are often displayed using TreeView control that offers convenient way to navigate the hierarchies and filter the data displayed by other controls.

In this post I’ll show you how to

Create a view out of a normalised dimensional hierarchy (snowflake schema) represented by two tables, i.e. Category and Product tables, and
Populate a Silverlight TreeView control from a dimension table.
If you would like to follow me, you need to download the Northwind database from here.

Step 1: Building the TreeView Source View

Open the SQL Server Management Studio and create the following view

Read more: Codeproject

Posted via email from .NET Info