Using the AnalyzerBusinessGroup annotation in Pentaho Analyzer

A quiet, maybe too quiet, new feature of Analyzer in Pentaho 4.8 was the addition of the AnalyzerBusinessGroup annotation.  This annotation will let you specify that a measure should go into a specific group rather than be lumped in with a bunch of measures.  If you have just a few measures, it’s not that big a deal.  But many users have a lot of measures that can be categorized and it would be nicer to have them in separate groups.  I have not tried this with dimensions, but if you define them correctly it seems that it would be overkill.  I also suspect that Mondrian 4’s Measure Groups will make this obsolete, but don’t know that for a fact.

Using the feature is very simple.  Just add an annotation to the measure and specify the AnalyzerBusinessGroup.  For example:

<Annotation name=”AnalyzerBusinessGroup”>Orders</Annotation>

and

<Annotation name=”AnalyzerBusinessGroup”>Prices</Annotation>

results in the following (using the Steel Wheels example):