Amulet developed a suite of bespoke reports to enable management to monitor and control the sales activity of a global e-commerce internet portal. This was an international development with the project team spread over multiple countries and different time-zones. Amulet worked within a development team of 20 but had sole responsibility for the reporting side of the project.

Amulet developed SSIS packages to extract data from the OLTP system into a staging area and then extracted and loaded the data into a data-warehouse 'star schema' consisting of dimension and fact tables.

The OLTP system consisted of over 700 tables of which only 30 were utilised within the reports. Due to the design of the data-warehouse, reports were a lot quicker to develop and the performance of the reports was extremely responsive.

As this was a global solution, the reports were required to be translated into different languages. To achieve this, expressions were used in place of static strings for the column headings and titles on the reports so that a 'language' parameter could be passed in at run-time to render the reports in a number of different languages with the translations held in a database table. Formatting of numbers, dates and currencies was achieved using inline custom code making use of the System.Globalization .NET Framework classes.

The front-end for the reports was Java server pages and so integration was required between Java and the report server. Amulet developed a set of 'helper' tables so that the Java front-end could dynamically render the appropriate reports and parameter lists in a multi-lingual manner.