After the connection to the database has been established, Interactive PMCube Explorer initializes the values of all dimension levels which are required to define the OLAP queries. In general, there are two different ways to retrieve the values of the dimension levels:
Database: The values are loaded from the database. This assumes, that each possible value for a dimension level is implicitly defined inside the database, e.g. as a tuple in a specific dimension table (see the schema page for more details).
User defined: The values are explicitly defined by the user in the meta-data editor and saved inside the meta-data file.
Interactive PMCube Explorer supports three different kinds of dimension level values:
Element Value: This kind of dimension level value represents an elementary value, e.g. a single number or string like "1.4" or "Place order".
Collection Value: This kind of value comprises a non-empty collection of elementary values, e.g. {"Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday"}. All values of the collection are expected to be of the same type. Different collection values may be overlapping, i.e. an elementary value can be part of multiple collection values (e.g. {"Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday"} and {"Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"}).
Range Value: This kind of value defines a range of (typically numerical) values, e.g. "10 to 20". The range must be defined as a SQL code condition restricting the relevant database column to the desired range.
Each dimension level value may have a given name which must be unique for its dimension level. Especially for collection values, this name should be descriptive because it is displayed in the user interface instead of the real value.