Invoking the Procedures

When using the OLAP Catalog write APIs, you should be aware of logic and conventions that are common to all the CWM2 procedures.

Security Checks and Error Conditions

Each CWM2 procedure first checks the calling user's security privileges. The calling user must have the OLAP_DBA role. Generally, the calling user must be the entity owner. If the calling user does not meet the security requirements, the procedure fails with an exception. For example, if your identity is jsmith, you cannot successfully execute CWM2_OLAP_HIERARCHY.DROP_HIERARCHY for a hierarchy owned by jjones.

After verifying the security requirements, each procedure checks for the existence of the entity and of its parent entities. All procedures, except CREATE procedures, return an error if the entity does not already exist. For example, if you call CWM2_OLAP_LEVEL.SET_DESCRIPTION, and the level does not already exist, the procedure will fail.

Size Requirements for Parameters

CWM2 metadata entities are created with descriptions and display names. For example, the CREATE_CUBE procedure in the CWM2_OLAP_CUBE package requires the following parameters:

CREATE_CUBE (
          cube_owner            IN   VARCHAR2,
          cube_name             IN   VARCHAR2,
          display_name          IN   VARCHAR2,
          short_description     IN   VARCHAR2,
          description           IN   VARCHAR2);

Entity names and descriptions have size limitations based on the width of the columns where they are stored in the OLAP Catalog model tables. The size limitations are listed in Table 2-2.

Table 2-2 Size Limitations of CWM2 Metadata Entities

Metadata Entity	Maximum Size
entity owner	30 characters
entity name	30 characters
display name	30 characters
short description	240 characters
description	2000 characters

Case Requirements for Parameters

You can specify arguments to CWM2 procedures in lower case, upper case, or mixed case.

If the argument is a metadata entity name (for example, dimension_name) or a value that will be used in further processing by other procedures (for example, the solved_code of a hierarchy), the procedure converts the argument to upper case. For all other arguments, the case that you specify is retained.