Cube Factories
Built on top of the data source abstraction, schema and cube factories are responsible to actually create dimensions (also using some sort of additional meta-information) and facts.
The cube builder framework may be extended with new factories to build your schemas and cubes the way you want (possibly even bypassing the concept of data source if not required). As for the functions plugin described in the previous chapter, each new builder class is injected using XML elements in a regular file.
Example
For example, here is the Excel data source plugin description file as shipped with icCube. It adds three new classes that allow you to define a cube right from Excel sheets and more specifically a cube factory class.
<plugins xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://www.crazy-development.com/schemas/icCubePlugins.xsd">
<name>Excel Cube Factory</name>
<builder className="crazydev.iccube.builder.excel.factory.cube.OlapBuilderExcelHeaderCubeDefFactory"/>
<builder className="crazydev.iccube.builder.excel.datasource.OlapBuilderExcelDataSource"/>
<builder className="crazydev.iccube.builder.excel.datasource.OlapBuilderExcelDataTable"/>
</plugins>
The class allows you to define (in a pretty straightforward manner) a cube using an Excel data source as described here.
For a complete description of each class, the source code of this plugin is available within the corresponding ZIP file within the plugins directory of your installation.
Next chapter: Configuration describes different configuration settings.