With nextanalytics, we have taken a different approach to analytics. Our goal is to enable a junior or part-time business analyst to quickly provide insightful, ad-hoc information analysis to mainstream business managers.

You will not see a lot of statistic formulas or complicated concepts --  most business analysis relies on simple math; differences, growth, percentages, subtotals, average. When we do dip into a more advanced transformation such as a Frequency Distribution, we reduce it to a simple command (GetCountsOfValues) that most people will be able to understand.

In this first lesson, we start with an explanation of nextanalytics scripting. It is fundamental to understanding the core advantages of using nextanalytics with your BI tools, charting packages and spreadsheets.

Scripts commands tell the analytic engine what to do but, more importantly, the scripts execute one line at a time such the results from one command automatically becomes the input to the next command. This simple approach to sequential data processing has tremendous advantages over query and formula based products. Since the script commands act on the current page, regardless of where it came from, they tend to be highly portable and easily be re-used with other sets of data.

Although data can be obtained from many sources, it's rarely in the format that you need. With nextanalytics, it's easy to get what you want. Easy, dynamic generation of crosstabs from a wide variety of data sources is usually the first step toward understanding your data, especially if you're trying to develop good charting and visualization. 

We're going to show some basic operations that select data, sort it, and then filter it.

Sometimes you have to search and select rows based on a text attribute within the row. nextanalytics often uses this before or after an analytic command.

This command dynamically calculates a column summary value (in this example, the average) and then keeps or removes rows according to how they compare to it.

Simple colored alerting based on row, column or page averages can make different aspects of your data stand out. See how easily nextanalytics uncovers new information perspectives hidden in your reports.

Comparisons are easy with nextanalytics! In this example, you'll see how to compare numbers to the column average, and express the results as a percentage.

See how easily nextanalytics lets you split up a group of numbers into predefined 'buckets' so you can perform a custom distribution analysis.

nextanalytics can leverage the number formatting capabilities of the Microsoft ASP.NET environment.

Introduction

Most integrations require some form of user input to alter runtime processing of a query.

This short document explains and demonstrates a popular example. This example shows you how to create a unix jsp page or aspx page that accepts user input for nextanalytics to modify the nextanalytics runtime processing.

After this step is complete, you, the customer, can choose from a variety of open source techniques to display or store the results (this is the subject of a different entry).

User Interface

Let’s start by specifying a page that shows in a browser that has the following form. This will allow us to gather the user preferences of how they want a comparison made and which type of calculation to make.

When they click the Submit button, the user’s choices is supplied to the next browser page.

The next snippet is code that’s embedded in the second browser page. It extracts the user’s preferences and modifies the query on the fly and submits it. First, it uses traditional java code to get the values:

Then it incorporates it into a three line nextanalytics script:

These three lines are submitted to the nextanalytics engine one at at time and nextanalytics processes each one in turn. The first line loads the data, the second line performs a FilterByValue command, and the third line assigns a self-explanatory title to the finished result for the end-user to see what they chose.

Supply Custom Parameters to a SQL Command Before Execution

Many people might have wanted to submit a SQL command instead of loading a CSV formatted file (as shown above. Here is the code snippet again, this time adding the data as a SQL Command:

Like the first example, it extracts some values that were entered by the user.

But then it differs. It uses some of the user supplied values to define a SQL command "on-the-fly".  What we mean by that it is that it supplies a user id and password and a value to use in a where clause.

Being able to modify query results is a very common requirement in many integrations.

Displaying the results

nextanalytics offers several ways for the programmer to show the results to the end user. Explaining the different choices are out of the scope of this document. But, to give you something to think about, here is a list of things you might want to do:

• Save the results to an XML file, with or without a XSL file. This one is our favorite because it lets you pretty well do anything you want.
• Save the results to a CSV file or custom XML suitable to an application you already interface with or own.
• Save the results to HTML table, Charting or Dashboard packages, or load it into controls such as aspx or one of the popular commercial packages.
• Save the results to a database table, thus allowing BI and Microsoft Office tools to read it.
• Write your part as a Web Service, and supply the results to a Web Service caller perhaps as CSV or XML strings.
• These can all done by using the Free Open Source that we provide as well as submissions to our forums.

If you search your download, you’ll find plenty of code to do this that you can modify.

We also recommend you search our web site, particularly the forums (search the words shown above).   You will find various explanations and examples on how to do all of the foregoing.