OLAP Provider for Excel

[Database Administrator]

Hello,

I am writing a custom provider with the ultimate goal of supporting pivot
tables in Excel.

I am aware about already existing solutions from other companies (like
Symba) but in my particular case this is not a solution. I have to do it on
my own.

I have started from the OLEDB sample provider in the Platoform SDK and I am
making slow progress. As of now, I have some troubles while getting data. I
thinks I have declared the right interfaces the provider implements. The fact
is that Excel returns an error stating that my driver does not support the
capabilities required by Excel.

A little digging down the road I have started to understand that Excell uses
IDBProperties and ISessionProperties to query for required properties. As I
understand the problem at this point, I fail to support all the properties
required by Excel. And now the question:

What is the minimal set of properties a provider shall support in order to
qualify for Excel?

and a second one:

What is the minimal set of interfaces a provider shall support in order to
qualify for Excel?

Regards,

Radu

[Database Administrator]

Hi Radu,

we have ODBO provider written using MS ATL templates from scratch. It
works in Excel XP/2003/2007 (most of PivotTable features are
supported).

Could you please find out at what stage Excel fails. (You can start it
under Visual Studio debugger and look at ATL trace calls).

The issues should be resolved step by step.

Kind regards,

Anton

[Database Administrator]

Yalos wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am writing a custom provider with the ultimate goal of supporting pivot
> tables in Excel.
>
> I am aware about already existing solutions from other companies (like
> Symba) but in my particular case this is not a solution. I have to do it on
> my own.
>
> I have started from the OLEDB sample provider in the Platoform SDK and I am
> making slow progress. As of now, I have some troubles while getting data. I
> thinks I have declared the right interfaces the provider implements. The fact
> is that Excel returns an error stating that my driver does not support the
> capabilities required by Excel.
>
> A little digging down the road I have started to understand that Excell uses
> IDBProperties and ISessionProperties to query for required properties. As I
> understand the problem at this point, I fail to support all the properties
> required by Excel. And now the question:
>
> What is the minimal set of properties a provider shall support in order to
> qualify for Excel?
>
> and a second one:
>
> What is the minimal set of interfaces a provider shall support in order to
> qualify for Excel?
>
> Regards,
>
> Radu

There is some good documentation here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb407625.aspx