Saiku UI Enhancements and new Excel export

Hi everybody. As promised we've some chestnuts that are ready to be eaten and here we are! We decided to start working on one of the major pieces of the Pentaho CE suite: the newest OLAP client Saiku. We have some enhancement in our pipeline to help the Trout, Paul and the other guys of the crew; this is the first of the list. We decided to start with two enhancements that makes all more beautiful to our customers eyes:

1) Improved columns header management
2) New and improved Excel export functionality

Improved columns header management

A thing that I totally don't like in Saiku was the way it managed the columns headers any time we had repeated values on it. You can see a sample of this old behavior in the figure below.

Now the things are totally different. With a little UI improvement column headers with repeated values are grouped together as displayed in the picture below to have better visualization of your data.

New Excel export

Here we have completely rewritten the export module using Apache POI instead of JExcelAPI. This gives us more power and more feature that could be useful in the future to enhance the functionality. The look and feel now is more elegant and exactly equal to what the user is seeing in the user interface. You can see a sample of the new output below

This is a first release beta release of these features so be careful if you decide to use it. Any feedback about how they work and what you would like to have next is fully appreciated.

Where you can find it

All the code is committed to the GitHub Serasoft repository. You can find it here. We're planning the installation of an Hudson server on our servers in the cloud so that you can pickup anything already compiled so be patient. At the moment you can only grab the sources and compile it. Remember that our code is always aligned with all the new functionalities of the standard Saiku distribution. So what else? Stay tuned for the next things that are going to be released...