OLAP Beta Controls Put to the Test

A previewer of the ComponentOne OLAP for Silverlight Beta controls sent me a link to a site he made using the controls. He's allowed me to show some screenshots and describe the functionality a bit.

The app uses not only the C1Olap controls, but also C1PdfDocument, C1UniformGrid and C1Toolbar. The application imports tabular data in CSV format and uses C1Olap to transform it into pivot grids and charts. With a single glance he can now see how people are using his site. Creating new views is a matter of dragging, dropping, and clicking the "Snapshot" button. Getting reports is a matter of clicking the "Generate" button.

The controls have been styled with the Expression Light toolkit theme which gives the whole app a fresh and consistent look and feel. In addition to ComponentOne controls, the developer used the Blacklight Controls (very cool stuff available on CodePlex). The image below shows how C1Olap and the Blacklight controls work together seamlessly to show several snapshots in draggable floating panels.

The app also features direct export to PDF using C1.Silverlight.Pdf. This component can render regular Silverlight Visuals into PDF documents, either as raster images or as resolution-independent, scalable vector graphics. It also provides methods that allow you to insert arbitrary content (text, images, and graphics) anywhere in the document.

The image below shows a PDF file created by the application being viewed in Acrobat Reader:

C1.Silverlight.Olap is still in early beta, but as you can see it can already be used to create powerful and flexible dashboard-style applications for Silverlight. The object model is identical to the one found in the C1.Win.Olap product, which provides the same functionality on the WinForms platform.

You can download the beta from http://www.componentone.com/SuperProducts/OLAPSilverlight/