xamPivotGrid with custom Cube structure.

Hi,

Has any further progress been made in the area of binding a XamPivotGrid to a custom data source?

I have my own aggregation server and I would like to bind the resultant data provided by this service to the pivot control. My server does not formally publish itself as an XMLA data source as this is somewhat too generic for my needs, but what I do have does provide resultant data in a form similar to the following:

public class FlatPivotTable
{
public FlatPivotAxis XAxis { get; set; }
public FlatPivotAxis YAxis { get; set; }
public AggregatedValue[][] Cells { get; set; }
}

where my axis is somewhat crudely defined in a fashion similar to this (note the hierarchy):

public class FlatPivotAxis
{
public string HeaderValue { get; set; }
public int Position { get; set; }
public int Level { get; set; }
public int Width { get; set; }
public IDictionary<string, FlatPivotAxis> Children { get; set; }
}

The point to stress is that my cell values are all pre-aggregated according to the definition of my two axes. eg: the root position in my x-axis would typically have a position of zero, implying that the first column is the grand total, etc.

I'm having some difficulties understanding how I can map data in the above form into something that is displayed correctly on the pivot grid. I've considered writing my own class that derives from DataSourceBase (in a fashion similar to FlatDataSource), however this seemed a little excessive given that my FlatPivotTable can be converted (with some effort) into the existing IResult interface used by the existing data sources. My other worry going down this route (for the moment) is that its not completely clear to me whether this approach would work.

I've had a look at the CustomDataProviderSample.zip, which overrides XmlaDataSource to seemingly achieve a similar effect (using RIA services behind the scenes, but it seems that's neither here nor there). I've had a few issues getting this to work:

1. It seems that the visible result is implicitly bound to the cube schema itself, and its not immediately clear to me how I can coerce a schema into place that will map to particular result-sets in the form given above. My attempts so far have only been partially successful. eg: In some cases I've got data displayed, but column expansion/hiding isn't, etc.

2. Its also not clear to me how I programmatically instruct my custom view model to refresh data from the data-provider (using the command). It seemed to work, partially, when I made use of the data selector, but I don't really want to use this control as I have my own user-interface around the control that I want to retain.

Basically, and this might sound ridiculous, what I would really prefer is to be able to simply tell the grid to display the data I want it to display (in a similar fashion to a regular data-grid), except that the data is obviously structured according to two hierarchical axes. I was hoping that I could construct an IResult in some form and simply bind that, but this doesn't seem to be working as I expect.

Would it be possible for you to shed some light on how I might achieve this using your control? If implementing my own DataSource by deriving from DataSourceBase directly is the only option then it would be helpful to have some hints as to how one goes about doing this (particularly as my source data is just about in the right format - no real conversion required).

Many thanks, Kevin