UltraEdit with Essbase: Part 1 – Running MaxL

I’ve been using UltraEdit (actually, UltraEdit Studio but this technique works fine with ‘regular’ UltraEdit too) as a text editor / SSH client / FTP browser for a couple of years now, although I’ve barely scratched the surface of its capabilities. In this series of posts, I’m going to show some simple but helpful features that I use when working with UltraEdit and Essbase. First up will be turning UltraEdit into a bare-bones MaxL environment.

UltraEdit has a feature to create a shortcut to a Windows command or script, passing in the file active in the editor as a parameter, and retrieving the output. This works very nicely when editing a MaxL script file, allowing us to invoke MaxL, execute the script being edited, and return the results into a new file for reference or further editing.

Setting this up is quite straightforward. First, open UltraEdit.

Open UltraEdit

Select Advanced | Tool Configuration, which opens the Tool Configuration dialog.

Tool Configuration Dialog

Click the Insert button and enter a value for Menu Item Name (e.g. ‘Run MaxL’).

Enter Menu Item Name

In the Command Line box enter the full path to startMaxl.cmd, plus the token ‘%f’ (%f tells UltraEdit to append the path and name of the current file to the command), for example:

C:\Oracle\Middleware\EPMSystem11R1\products\Essbase\EssbaseClient\bin\startMaxl.cmd %f

Enter Command Line

Click OK to save the tool. It will now appear with a shortcut assigned on the Advanced menu. As an aside, the shortcut can be changed via Advanced | Configuration, where the new tool, assuming it is the first one you have added, will be listed as a KeyMapping for “AdvancedUserTool1”.

Using MaxL from UltraEdit is now a simple two-step process. First, create (and save) a MaxL script file – in this case, Test.msh:

Create MaxL Script

Then select Advanced | Run MaxL. UltraEdit will invoke MaxL, passing in the active file (i.e. Test.msh) and creating a new file that contains the output!

Output of MaxL Script

In later posts, I’ll look at using some other UltraEdit features to do interesting things with the MaxL output, and demonstrate some syntax highlighting that can make – for example – MDX a little more user friendly.

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