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Click here to review all ideas and share your votes.

https://ideas.sap.com/ct/ct_list.bix?c=6055F3C4-E8DA-454F-9C49-85D5A5070BCE

Cheers

On behalf of The SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio Team

If Design Studio is one thing, then you can call it flexible. Anything you do not have you can build it yourself. Personally I like the bullet graph as it was defined by Stephen few.

This graph is designed to replace meters and gauges and delivers much more information in the same amount of space. Like meters and gauges a bullet graph is meant to display one keyfigure and and complimentary measures to enrich the meaning by allowing you comparisons to for example the year before or a budget or target.

Source Stephen Few: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/misc/Bullet_Graph_Design_Spec.pdf

Let’s see how far we can get building this bullet graph in Design Studio. The answer is this far :

as you can see it has all the elements of the bullet graph. Comparison fill colors, a quantitative scale, an actuals bar and finally a symbol marker that encodes the comparative measure. To give you an impression about the size of the graph. The label texts are 8px in size meaning that you could (If you wanted) put a large amount of graphs into your dashboard.

Building the bullet graph

First let me show you the overview of the components :

As you can see we use a lot of panel components to build the graph. There is a panel for each part including the scales, the background, the actuals and the comparison value. In the panel components for the actuals and the scale we have text components with numbers to enable the user to make sense of the graph.

For the CSS I used the following classes :

.firststage { background-color: #999999 ; }
.secondstage { background-color: #bbbbbb ; }
.thirdstage { background-color: #dddddd ;}
.actuals { background-color: #000000}
.comparison { background-color: #000000; }
.smalltext  { font-size: 8 px;

font-family: Geometric, Futura, Helvetica, Gotham, serif;
font-color: #666;
line-height:120%;}

in the css style property of the actuals bar and the scale components I’ve added extra css to make them thinner (the minimum setting of a panel component is 10 width and height)

using height: 5px;for the actual bar and

width: 2px;
height: 3px;

for the scales I reduced the size of these components. I did it in the style as setting these in the class didn’t work. You need to work out the subclass of the panel component as David Gyurasz already showed in answer to another question about these kind of issues (http://scn.sap.com/thread/3409979)

In the application startup we set up the values. In this example I’ve based them on hardcoded numbers  but you can easily replace them with numbers from a datasource using the .getdata method.

Mind though that you need to relate the size of the number to the width of the graph. In my case as the graph itself is 250px wide I divide the value of 315 by 2 to the actuals bar will be 168px wide, well within the range of the graph size. This recoding is based on the IF THEN statement I put in to check the size of the actuals measure. Off course this is only an example and you need to expand it for other sizes. Alternatively you can recode them in your query if that is easier for you.

var actualsnumber = 315; 
if (actualsnumber > 200  || (actualsnumber < 450)) {       actuals = 315 / 2;
} 
comparison = 235;
stage1 = 80;
stage2 = 40;
stage3 = 30;
var stage1local = 40.0;
CHRT_ACTUALS.setWidth(actuals);
CHRT_FIRSTSTAGE.setWidth(stage1);
CHRT_SECONDSTAGE.setLeftMargin(stage1);
CHRT_SECONDSTAGE.setWidth(stage2);
CHRT_THIRDSTAGE.setLeftMargin(stage1 + stage2 );
CHRT_THIRDSTAGE.setWidth(stage3);

(replace actualsnumber with DS_1.getdata and so on)

There you have it. A bullet graph in design studio. The next step for me will be learning the SDK so this can be a standard component. That will make usage a lot easier. Additionally when a graph can pick up a single line of a data source as mentioned in some discussions for 1.2 then you could build a series of bullet graphs into your dashboard based on the SDK component and one datasource

As you may have seen in my last blog  (Creating a bullet graph in Design Studio.)I wanted to use bullet graphs in my dashboard. In the first version I used panels, text components etc to put them together. For demo purposes this is fine, but for production you just want to drag in a graph, bind it to data and not program each number into the components yourself.

As I am part of the SDK beta program and the book about Design Studio I co-wrote (Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio)

is being printed I finally have time to give the SDK a go. My experience is very limited but I managed to build a nice version :

The Final result of my first SDK try is this :

image 1: bullet graph

As you can see the three bars, the actual and the comparison are all there.  Instead of building this graph from individual components now you can drag the graph in from the component menu as shown below:

image 2:component menu with the bullet graph component

After  you drag it onto the canvas, you are able to see the properties of the custom component on the right. As you can see I already have a number properties in place to change the colors and bind the query data to the graph. Actually using those properties to change the behavior still needs some work though.

image 3: custom component with properties

Finally the graph can be resized at will. The Graph is built using SVG (read more here) which scales up and down very nicely. You basically create your own canvas and when you resize the canvas will be related to the window available for the graph.

Next steps:

My next steps will be to invoke a css sheet so you can change the looks by adding CSS classes. Expand the bullet into a panel that lists a number  of bullet graphs. That way you do not need a query for each bullet graph, but use a single query where a bullet graph is put in the panel for each row in the datasource.

Conclusion.

In the same weekend I said   “Hello World” in Eclipse I was able to manage the above. I am quite satisfied with the result. After initial problems to get to know Eclipse I was able to build something quite fast which shows that once the SDK is GA you can do anything you could possibly think of.

It has been a while since I wanted to update my blog. Today is Thanksgiving in Canada and decided to take the time and post the highlights to my TechED presentation (session ID: EA116). The subtitle of my presentation is: Do More with Less. I find it truly reflects our reality as a Global organization and I’m sure for a lot of readers, you’ll easily relate to this.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Prague, Czech Republic for our first MCI (MolsonCoors International) annual meeting. People came from across the globe (China, India, UK, San-Francisco, Denver and Montreal) to this important meeting.

The first objective of the meeting was to present to the MCI team, my role as a BI Business Partner, showcase our BI Strategy and Tools.

Our second objective was to meet with Business Experts within our Central Europe Organization.

With the increase of new BI tools, BEx Queries, Sources, etc. we, our BI Team needs to take back control and standardize our offering. Our IT team has recently been restructured (read downsized) and we no longer have the capacity to fulfil the demand in BI. We need to do more with Less. See the common thread?

How can we achieve this with less IT resources? With Business Experts.

This last part is a critical role for the success of our BI strategy. Luckily, our CE organization has a head start in this area and we are quickly applying some of their learning over the years.

At the same time, we have noticed that there seems to have more and more BI tools coming each year. From an Architecture, Development and Support, it’s hard to keep up sometimes. This is especially from an end-user perspective where they just want their numbers!

When preparing my MCI presentation, I took back a step back and noticed that we had deployed BI in the past from a tool perspective with not much success and end-user confusion. In our new reality, if we want to be successful we need to look at it from a Needs perspective. Selecting the right tool for the need is the key to a successful deployment.

Here’s a slide that resumes it well.

In my next post, I go in more details on how the tools can help us in Doing More with Less.

If you are going to TechEd, come to my presentation (Wednesday 5:45- 6:45) and you'll get all the scoop!

Intro

If you have read my previous two blogs you know I was busy developing a bullet chart. First using panel components in design studio and in the next step with the help of the beta version of the SDK. In this blog I want to do a step back from the technology and show how such a graph type can be useful in a dashboard. I will show a design where I use that type of chart to visualize a lot of single numbers. A dashboard to monitor the quality of a BW system.

The dashboard .

First let me show the SAP BW monitoring dashboard,

In this dashboard you see that the dashboard has five main themes: User acceptance, Query Usage, Data loads, System and changes. Together these themes hold 24 key figures that are compared to a scale ranging from bad (dark) to good (light). As you can see sometimes less is better (light background on the right side) and sometimes higher is better. For comparison purposes you see a vertical line that shows a value that can be from a previous period or the same period last year.

In the top left you see a couple of menu items. At the top you see alerts, transports and notes. The number in de red circle shows that there are issues that require immediate attention.

Below that you see icons that allow the user to navigate to another section of the app where more analysis options are available across dimensions.

Design choices explained

Colors
The colors scheme is a very basic grey and the alerts are shades of red. The reason for this choice is that I only want to highlight something when anything needs addressing. As you can see you can easily identify where you need to focus on first. If I would use colors on every bullet (green,yellow, red for example) the red dots would stand out much less than they do now.

The themes and their relation to each other

The  thought behind the design is that the most important question is “Are the users happy using the system”. At the end BW is a tool that helps the business.  At the basic level a user is happy when the system offers help that is very valuable, easy to use and reliable.

The KPI choices reflect that. In the user section (that is on the top left as it is the most important subject) we see happiness, and usage as the main kpi’s. satisfied / dissatisfied are also present, but generally users show what they truly think with their feet. They walk away when they’re dissatisfied or want more when they’re happy.

The other themes are driver kpi’s that should support the result kpi’s in the user segment.

Query Theme

The query theme is your product segment. Your queries are an assortment of products that are in store to serve your customers or users. In the Dashboard we look at the queries in terms of usage.  How often they are used, how intensive they are being utilized ,  how the newly introduced queries are doing and finally how many queries are near their end-of-life.

Data loads

The data loads are important in terms of reliability. Basically you want to know how often they are on time and if you see trends that threaten to lower the chance of being ready every morning.

Changes

The quality of your change process is an indicator for the future value and reliability of your BW system. Projects on time and on budget means that  the projects more or less go as planned. The other ones tell how many corners had to be cut to be able to deliver. Note that user acceptance isn’t on this theme, as I stated that users tend to show their opinion with their feet and thus we look at the usage stats and not official acceptance documents.

System

Finally the system. The indicators here tell something about the future reliability of the system. Warnings here will result in less reliability in the future.

Conclusion

This was an example of a dashboard made in design studio using the bullet graphs. I showed how it looked and the thought that was behind the design. As you can see you can invoke a lot of bulletgraphs in one dashboard without cluttering the screen. Further we chose to put the user acceptance to the left top of the dashboard to emphasize that those are the most important key figures.

**Hi everyone due to presenter availability we need to move both sessions up 1 week. 

Are you interested in finding out about SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.2?  Hear from the product owners Jie Deng and Eric Schemer discuss

the new features of SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.2.  There will be time for Q/A. Mark your calendars.

December 2nd, 2013, 8:00am-9:00am (CET)

URL: https://sap.emea.pgiconnect.com/bods12/

Conference Access Code 402010

December 5th, 2013, 6:00pm-7:00pm (CET)

URL: https://sap.emea.pgiconnect.com/bods12/

Conference Access Code 222961

Phone Conference Information for Either Session

Yesterday I attended the World Premiere of Design Studio 1.2 at TechEd.  This is part of the "share the knowledge" tour.

SAP's Eric Schemer provided this session.  The usual disclaimer applies that things discussed are subject to change.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Figure 1 shows overall planned features for Design Studio 1.2

Figure 1 shows an added navigation panel that allows users to filter and data drilldown and export to Excel.

Planned for release 1.3 is the export to PowerPoint.

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Figure 2 covers the new SDK, planned to be released with Design Studio 1.2

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Figure 3 covers new chart types, axis scaling, and the measure picker which allows binding of certain data cells.  Additionally there is a new chart background color.

Figure 4: Source: SAP

Figure 4 covers improvements to cross tabs, including changing the column width, enabling and disabling hierarchical navigation

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Figure 5 shows the new Navigation Panel, allowing you to filter and navigate in Design Studio. The added navigation panel allows users to filter and drilldown data.

Figure 6: Source: SAP

Design Studio 1.2 will support .UNX as a data source.

Figure 7: Source: SAP

Figure 7 shows the planned roadmap (subject to change) that shows the Background Query Loading which will improve performance.

Design Studio 1.3 is planned to have offline capabilities for Mobile

Eric said the top request was BW-IP support for Design Studio.

Planned for 1.3 is the HANA deployment - use Design Studio on HANA - without a BI Platform or Netweaver

Also planned for 1.3 is the BEx: Drag & drop, context menu, and RRI features.

In terms of Lumira visualization and put in Design Studio for a more sophisticated visualizaton

Figure 8: Source: SAP

Figure 8 covers BEx tools that are in maintenance mode and conversion support is planned for Design Studio, including web template migration.

Figure 9: Source: SAP

Figure 9 shows the full picture from XCelsius perspective

BusinessObjects customers today continue to use dashboards via Universes but can consider using Design Studio 1.2 as it offers universe support.

Figure 10: Source: SAP

Eric suggested if you start doing BI projects, take a look at analysis clients & Design Studio as you are not losing any key BW capabilities

Figure 11: Source: SAP

Figure 11 shows the suggested simplified adoption steps for BEx customers.

Question and Answer

Q: EPM - does it integrate with Design Studio?

A: Working on tidying up backend - BW-IP / BPC and looking at moving into one technical platform

On HANA - building a new HANA-based planning engine

Design Studio will work on both in the future

Q: Lifecycle of XCelsius?

A: Similar to BEx - offering with next BI4.x platforms and will work

No major new development

Q: Scheduling options for Design Studio?

A: Can't schedule at the moment

Planned for 1.4 Analysis Office SP/Feature pack

Design Studio will look at offline capabilities

Q: No Java stack needed in BW?

A: Not needed for Design Studio - it is an add-on to BI4x

Q: Bookmarks are coming - with SDK - can we achieve this functionality with the SDK?

A: Can do with the SDK; want to have it in 1.3 as a standard capability

Q:  Are there performance benchmarks with DS vs XC

A: No

In this series of blogs on SAP Design Studio, we will explore simple but powerful tips and tricks.

* * *

Dashboards often contain multiple views in a single pane. However typical dashboard users process one chart or table at a time except in cases where data needs to be compared. Under such circumstances, designers have the option to go for one of the two UI design patterns

• Show only one chart at a time, and toggle to other charts upon user interaction OR
• Distribute the screen space amongst the charts more or less equally based on the charts’ importance.

SAP Design Studio however makes a third approach possible. You could allocate a higher proportion of real estate to one chart (say, 75%), and render miniature versions of other charts on the right or at the bottom (see image). Typically these miniature charts would not have legends or series labels. You could then swap the main chart with other charts on-demand by leveraging a combination of scripting functions.

In SAP Dashboards (Xcelsius), you could achieve this only by having duplicate charts (where the chart types differ) and manipulating dynamic visibility. In SAP Design Studio, you can accomplish the above without requiring additional or duplicate charting components. The chart type, data source and presentation format can all be managed through scripting.

Note that the charts on the right in the example above are not thumbnails, but actual miniaturized charts. There is an additional benefit to this design – users can now observe how selections done to the main chart impact other visualizations (well, at least when the impact is major).

HOW WE ACHIEVED THIS:

The basic functionality can be achieved by the following components

• 2 Grid Containers
• 3 Panels
• 3 Charts
• 1 Global Variable
• 1 Button/Image/Text component

There are 3 Data Sources one for each chart, and additional non-functional components (e.g. Company Logo)

On the right side, one transparent panel is placed over each chart to enable the user drag and drop the charts into the main window. This also prevents the user from accidentally making a selection in the miniature charts.

The following code executes the swap. This has to be added to the OnClick() event of both the panels with some obvious minor changes. The conditional statement at the end that checks a global variable before logging (optional).

It goes without saying that the above framework can be extended to accommodate additional miniature charts. Additional functions can also be added to make this a comprehensive application.

Source: http://www.visualbis.com/blogs/design-studio/2013/08/19/sap-design-studio-tips-and-tricks-1/

Zeiss is a company producing lenses and products using lenses. As an example we were shown a picture of moon astronauts carrying zeiss camera’s. For those who want to pick them up. They are still there! (

Zeiss is a longtime SAP customer and a longtime SAP BW user. They already worked with SAP BW version 1.2a in 1999. They stayed a long time one version 3.5 but when they upgraded they opted for a rebuild rather than an upgrade. For SAP Design Studio they have upgraded to 7.3.

They are a very early adopter making the first dashboards with version 1.0. They wanted to go to Design Studio because they find that the Web Application Designer is to complex, they like the easy to use layout (however they would like more wizards and documentation about the CSS)

(css docs could be available from version 1.2 sp1)

In the demo they showed Zeiss kept the layout very basic, only using that what the version of Design Studio at the time had to offer.

We were shown a sales representative dashboard where you could select regions and customers.

They have built a button in salesforce.com linking to the design studio application. They like the flexibility they gain when building their reports instead of uploading data to Salesforce.com.

They had still a wish list for Design Studio however. 99% of those wishes were solved in version 1.2. A very big gain is Background Query loading. Components will render  when relevant data is available instead of waiting for all the datasources to preload.

What they are still waiting for is some drag and drop functionality. They hope to see this in version 1.3.

Their next step is to build dashboards for the production floor. 2x per day the people at the factory meet to discuss the production and for this they have a wall full of printed reports. The goal is to replace this with a touch screen TV and run Design Studio applications to show all those reports.

1. They seem committed to go on with design studio and I’m interested to see how it evolves. Talked to the IT manager afterwards and he encouraged me to give Design Studio a try J. I think I’ll listen to his advice.

Tammy did already a great job outlining the Design Studio presentations (World Premiere of Design Studio 1.2 - Sharing the Knowledge from SAP TechEd) so I will not repeat that and just mention the things I found particularly interesting .

First of all version 1.2 is announced being GA on the 19^th of November. I will be sure to be near the download section on that date!.

Source: SAP

There are a lot of new things in version 1.2

• You can connect to a universe via BICS
• There will be an SDK where you can build your own visualizations. 
  In the workshop we could build an example component. It can be really simple, for example just some HTML for your own special logo, or advanced graphics using the D3 library.
• The Crosstab itself will show exceptions
  rather than scripting yourself and adding components the exceptions work automatically . from within the component. The individual components can be resized and you can do a table export to excel which gives you the dataset in a basic format.
• The filter panel is more advanced
  We were shown more advanced way of navigating in a demo where you had basically a complete analysis environment. Each action is done with clicks. Not drag&drop. This relates off course to the wish list that the Zeiss company mentioned.
• Query loading is improved by making background query loading possible
  This means that the application doesn’t have to wait for all the datasources to start rendering
• Measure picker
  being able to pick one row/column for a chart. This would mean that one datasource could support multiple charts. Those charts can be handled independent of each other

As you can see there is a lot happening. And more is coming in version 1.3. In a discussion we talked about the development of design studio. What happened is that SAP first showed a basic version (1.0) that didn’t have a lot of functionality but was stable. Based on that stability now more and more functionality and visualization options are being added.

Finally Design Studio was now officially announced as the premium alternative to Web application Designer and SAP Dashboard. Basically the last two go into maintenance mode while Design Studio continues to be improved. With 1.2 I think It is in number of functionalities already quite close to SAP Dashboard and in next year’s teched it will have caught up completely. With the added bonus of stability and future proof usage of technology it’s the way to go.

at the end of the afternoon i also saw a demo made by S. van Middelkoop

They built an application that was able to write data back into HANA using the XS layer of HANA. With this capability they made an what-if scenario application where the scenario numbers were written to hana and after the query refresh the data was shown using the scenario input. they now used the opennewwindow method from the application component, but in 1.2 with the SDK they will replace that with a button that does a direct call.

Title of the Book: "Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio "

http://www.sap-press.com/products/Getting-Started-with-SAP-BusinessObjects-Design-Studio.html

It's authored by:

Xavier Hacking, SAP BI specialist at Interdobs B.V.

Jeroen van der A, SAP BI consultant at Interdobs B.V.

I've written the foreword to the book -here it is to give you a taste of what is in the book:

I´m a big fan of the new SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio with the very powerful scripting functionalities. On the other side I like the very excellent and usual visualization possibilities of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.

For this purpose I have combined in an example Application the Design Studio components and the scripting logic with a typical Xcelsius Background component.  

Design Studio Application in design mode

Design Studio Application in run time mode

Very Easy step by step guide

1.) Add a Xcelsius Background Component of your choice

2.) Change the Background Color of the Background component of your choice

3.) Set the RGB Model of your choice

4.) Execute the .xlf File in Preview mode, make a screenshot of the backkground and save it as a Image file to use it in Design Studio

5.) Add a Image Component in your Design Studio Application

6.) Added standard "white" Image Component

7.) Load the saved Image Background file from Repository Folder

7.) Usable background component (Xcelsius syle) within the Design Studio Application (e.g. to use quadrants in Design Studio Dashboards)

SAP Design Studio Tips & Tricks Series

***

Executives typically demand multiple views of a single geography, business function, customer or process. Dashboards that deliver intelligence to support such requirements tend to either group them in a single view or break them down into multiple views.

SAP Design Studio makes a third approach feasible, whereby thumbnails can be used to help executives navigate to the KPI views they need. What’s more, SAP Design Studio can get this accomplished in an ultra-efficient manner. Consider the following:

• Unlike thumbnails seen in SAP Lumira, Design Studio can support thumbnails that are dynamic. In other words, the thumbnails can update themselves even when they are not selected (e.g. Multiple thumbnails are updated when the Region context is changed in the active view)
• Unlike with SAP Dashboards, Design Studio needs only ONE chart control in the main panel as it can support all types of native charts. Both the Data Source and the chart type could be updated during run time when a different thumbnail is selected.

 

• Imagine a scenario where you need to showcase 20 KPI views, each consisting of one chart. You can technically get the dashboard done using just 5 chart controls (for a layout similar to the above). In this case, as the user scrolls across the thumbnails, the thumbnail controls themselves are updated to show the next set of (four) views. This approach however has its own drawbacks as well, as it takes more time to refresh and load the thumbnails. In general, it all depends on striking a fine balance between factors such as (a) Initial load time (b) Lag time for subsequent interactions (c) Need for thumbnails to update themselves when context is changed in the active view etc. Note that we have foregone the minimal number of thumbnails (4) in this demo and instead opted for 8 thumbnails and used dynamic visibility.

The code:
The following code ensures that the main chart is updated, whenever a thumbnail is clicked. Each thumbnail will have a similar code in its OnClick event.

//to assign and load the data source
DS_MAIN.assignDataSource(“cuid:Afk2uBnjUxNDqrtx8EeWW1Q”,DataSourceType.INFOPROVIDER,“ZOIL_REG_CONS”);
DS_MAIN.loadDataSource();
//setting the chart type

CHART.setChartType(ChartType.HORIZONTAL_STACKED_BAR);

Also visit SAP Design Studio Tips & Tricks #1: Swapping charts into focus on demand

Source : http://www.visualbis.com/blogs/dashboards/2013/09/05/sap-design-studio-tips-tricks-2/

Today we had an ASUG webcast on Design Studio 1.2.  The usual disclaimer applies that this is subject to change and any forward looking statements should not be looked on as a commitment by SAP (subject to change).  Some of this is already covered World Premiere of Design Studio 1.2 - Sharing the Knowledge from SAP TechEd so I won't repeat that content here.

Eric Schemer, SAP Product Management, Design Studio, presented slides, while David Stocker, product management provided a live demo

Design Studio 1.2 planned to be released November 29 (subject to change)

Positioning

Figure 1: Source: SAP

How does Design Studio fit in client portfolio?  Developing in three streams / areas:

1. Agile Visualization
2. Dashboards and Apps
3. Reporting

Reporting is Crystal Reports for operational reporting and Web Intelligence is for interactive reporting

Agile visualization is self service for more business users such as Lumira.

Design Studio is in Dashboards and Apps category.  Key difference between Design Studio and Lumira / Web Intelligence– Design Studio is geared to more technical users and developers, and power users.

Design Studio is developed for design environment for those developing analytical applications for mobile and desktop usage.

Figure 2: Source: SAP

The strategy for dashboarding and analytical applications is converging development efforts on Design Studio.

This is for power users to build dashboards and applications moving forward

BEx Web Application Designer is in maintenance mode with no new innovations and capabilities. 

Dashboards (formerly known as XCelsius) will be shipped with every platform version – new development has been ramped down.  Focus of development teams is on Design Studio.

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Design analytical dashboards for others to consume for mass deployment scenarios.

The SDK allows developers to build their own visualizations and components and plug in to Design Studio

A forward looking statement is to bring in CVOM SDK that is used in Lumira will be in the Design Studio 1.3 timeframe – Design Studio will have a specific SDK and leverage CVOM SDK for extensions in both DS and Lumira.

Mobile app support is built in and will provide libraries for mobile devices. 

Design Studio uses same interface as BW

Figure 4: Source: SAP

If run BW queries in BEx web templates – the processing of queries happens sequentially and after all data has been read – key issue in BEx and WAD

Figure 4 shows three queries.  First query run – at the top – user can interact with that data while the next set of queries are run.

Design Studio 1.3 release will have Lumira integration where you take a Lumira board and turn that into a Design Studio application.

Design Studio 1.3 will have geo maps, large data visualizations and new charts planned

With the new background processing in Figure 4, it is not faking a delayed load and you can use it as a generic event

Other

Right now Design Studio has about 3,500 customers

Design Studio also “steal views from Analysis Office” with Smart Copy, which copies a new object to clipboard.  The object registers with clipboard and use this to transport queries with navigation states to Design Studio – Design Studio recognizes it from the clipboard – no logon prompt with a connection.

With Design Studio, sorting and set hierarchy not enabled by default.  There are no loops in Design Studio, no wait command and no color coding for Waterfall for positive/negative drivers

Resources Provided in Webcast:

First Delivery Note (not released yet):

https://websmp130.sap-ag.de/sap(bD1lbiZjPTAwMQ==)/bc/bsp/spn/sapnotes/index2.htm?numm=1912710

PAM Information

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/pam?hash=pvnr%3D67838200100900007053%26pt%3Dg%257Cd

Documentation:

http://help.sap.com/boad

Sizing Information:

https://websmp130.sap-ag.de/sap(bD1lbiZjPTAwMQ==)/bc/bsp/spn/sapnotes/index2.htm?numm=1177020

Idea Place :

https://ideas.sap.com/ct/s.bix?c=6055F3C4-E8DA-454F-9C49-85D5A5070BCE

eBook which will contain free Design Studio 1.2 Updates

Mastering SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio with SAP NetWeaver BW by ASUG SAP Point of Contact Ingo Hilgefort for $9.99 USD

Question & Answer

Q:  Until when are Dashboards ( Xcelsius) are supported?

A:  mainstream maintenance and then extended maintenance - will be shipped with every BI Platform release

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Have we already seen the last ever release of Dashboards/Xcelsius?

A:  See previous question - will be shipped with ever BI Platform release - good question for tomorrow's BI roadmap webcast 

________________________________________________________________

Q:  What are the BI Platform Support Package (4.0 and 4.1) requirements for Design Studio 1.2?

A:  Covered in the slides and also go to service.sap.com/PAM

A:  BI Platform BI 4.0 SP5 or 4.1SP0

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Are there any tools to convert Bex Wad dashboard templates to design studio

A:  Net yet, though migration tools for both XCelcius and WAD are  planned for on the long term roadmap.

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Do we  have any options for Static data like in Xcelsius for Design Studio?

A:  If you mean Excel, not in this release

A:  Depending on what kind of local data you are using, global variables may be able to fill that role

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Will v1.2 have functionality to convert &/or import Dashboard files to Design Studio format.

A:  Not in this release

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Can we deploy Design Apps onto SAP Portal?

A:  Yes this is one of the deployment options but check the PAM for releases 

________________________________________________________________

Q:  How about SharePoint portal?

A:  This is not currently available or planned

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Does SDK allow us to include Standard Client Side JavaScript?

A:  yes

________________________________________________________________

Q:  I see that Design Studio offer export to excel. Does it export the charts to Power point?

A:  At TechEd they said this is planned for 1.3 release

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Will Design Studio have the ability to use R scripts for statistics and charting?

A:  not currently; may be possible with the HANA XS engine in version 1.3

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Is it on the roadmap to be able to convert Lumira packages into Design Studio, Lumira targeted for ad hoc analysis presentation and Design Studio for ongoing standard presentation.

A:  this is being answered in the roadmap slide

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Is the a way for individual users to save user/instance specific defalut variables(variants).

A:  For this, I would use Analysis OLAP for this (variants) and then send to Design Studio 

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Can we merge data from multiple data sources?  UNX and BW queries etc.

A:  not in Design Studio.  That is a query or universe design issue

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Is BW HANA only way to connect Design studio in current relase?

A:  Universe support in 1.2 release

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Is there going to be integration with Web Intelligence?

A:  not at this time

________________________________________________________________

Q:  How is the licensing on DS? Do we get it automatically if we have a license for BOBJ 4.1?

A:  If you have a license for Xcelsius/Dashboards you should have a license for Design Studio (generally) - depends on license and contact your account exec

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Will the license keys we have for Xcelsius work with DS if we download it now?

A:  No license keys are needed in Design Studio

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Are all the components set going to be brought over in DS in long term?

A:  what do you mean by component sets?

________________________________________________________________

Q:  In 1.2 is the listbox corrected to selected multiple items

A: Yes

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Is there a plan for this in the future?

A:  If there is it is long-term

________________________________________________________________

Q:  From which version of Office Analysis smart copy is suported?

A:  Analysis 1.3 on this works - I recommend using it with 1.4

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Is Custom Components a separate download? which is supplement to standard components?

A:  Yes; come to the ASUG November 25th SDK webcast

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Can output of the DS be seen only via server? or a local file is available?

A:  Local is available with Excel export...

________________________________________________________________

Q:  Will there be a way to perform calculations n the data coming from source ( lie we do in excel in Xcelsius)

A:  Do with script commands or with upcoming custom components

_____________________________________________________________

I am combining notes from last week's ASUG webcast with SAP and SAP TechEd session EA260.  Of course, the usual disclaimer applies, that future things are subject to change.

Smart Copy and Paste from Analysis Office to Design Studio

Last week, SAP reviewed the newer "Smart Copy" and paste.  For background on the current version see Going from BusinessObjects Analysis Office to BusinessObjects Design Studio - Mobilize your Spreadsheet?

“Steal views from Analysis Office” said SAP on the ASUG Webcast.  Smart Copy brings an object to the Windows Clipboard that Analysis and Design Studio recognize and can handle.  In Design Studio 1.2, it has a “Smart Paste” and will be enabled when you go from Analysis Office to Studio.  It can read the conditional formatting from Analysis Office to Design Studio.

New Properties in 1.2

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Figure 1 shows new user interactivity features in the Properties pane of the crosstab such as Hierarchy Navigation Enabled, Sorting Enabled, and Column Resizing Enabled.

The setHierarchyNavigationEnabled is a property of crosstabs to enable or disable hierarchy navigation – you can set at design time or run-time

The example provided in the demo was CROSSTAB_1.setHierarchyNavigationEnabled(!CROSSTAB_1.isHierarchyNavigationEnabled());

This is something you can set at design time or run time.

Figure 2: Source: SAP

You can do this in the Edit > Initial View as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 3: Source: SAP

The same for sorting – API command example as shown in Figure 3.

CROSSTAB_1.setSortingEnabled(!CROSSTAB_1.isSortingEnabled());

Figure 4: Source: SAP

Conditional formatting in the Properties pane of the Crosstab is new.  Figure 4 shows how to use it in a script.

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Export to Excel is also enabled by scripts:

APPLICATION.export(ExportType.EXCEL_xlsx);

It generates an Excel document.  It does not export an Analysis Office document. 

With the new background processing,  it does not create a delayed load.  You can use it as a generic event

At the start-up event, you can start background processing with this:

APPLICATION.doBackgroundProcessing();

Then you go to the Data Sources and if Load in Script is false, the data source is loaded when the data source starts.  If the Data Source is set to true, it is not loaded at start and is expected to be started by script.  You can set the script at On Background processing Event.  See Figure 4 at ASUG Design Studio 1.2 Webcast Updates

Looking forward to the new release planned for later this month.

SAP Design Studio Tips & Tricks Series

John is a senior executive with a great eye for detail. He usually drives his review meetings covering one area at a time, and often drills down into facts as required. During such occasions, it may help to zoom into one specific chart at a time while still retaining other visualizations on the canvas – albeit on a smaller scale.

SAP Design Studio has the ability to accommodate such designs by rendering visualizations that could be re-sized, zoomed or minimized as needed. Design Studio supports several ways to achieve this:

• Zoom to full screen and scale back to original size at the click of a button (or an icon) – however other charts would be hidden from the view while zoomed in
• Increase size of any one visualization while readjusting other visualizations; Revert to the original view when done (this option is demonstrated below)
• Increase size of any one visualization incrementally until it reaches full-scale; Other charts could be readjusted as long as they have a certain threshold of available real estate (e.g. 15% of the screen), failing which they could be fully minimized.

This is another area where SAP Design Studio scores over SAP Dashboards (Xcelsius), where you could achieve this only by replicating visualizations.Click here for a detailed document.

Also visit

SAP Design Studio Tips and Tricks #1: Swapping charts into focus on-demand             

SAP Design Studio Tips and Tricks #2: Dynamic Thumbnails for better performance and usability

Source: http://www.visualbis.com/blogs/design-studio/2013/10/03/sap-design-studio-tips-tricks-3/

Design Studio 1.2 is available for download on Service Marketplace service.sap.com/swdc

SAP has already posted some tutorials today as well Design Studio 1.2: What’s new in SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.2 is just one example along with many 12 others at Space: SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio | SCN

Universe support

A first look shows you can connect to a Universe - of course everyone tries the eFashion universe:

I also tried it with an ECC universe and it works.  SAP's Ingo Hilgefort has emphasized at Reporting 2013 that you can use only single source universes.

Export to Excel

Using the knowledge gained at TechEd, I could do this:

Above shows the JavaScript code for when you click a button it will export to Excel.

So after clicking the button you can SAVE or OPEN the document in Excel.

Selecting Measures or "Measure Picker"

This is really binding the key figures you want to show

Only then will those two key figures appear.

Also see Design Studio 1.2: Select key figures to display on charts

Filter Navigation

SAP added a "navigation pane" where you can filter and navigate.  This is described in this tutorial:

Design Studio 1.2: Add navigation capabilities to a Filter Panel component

It is very easy to set up and do this - I used it against Solution Manager and filtered on the message component:

There is much more to add and check out - you can check out the tutorials, TechEd session EA 260 or also check Ingo's Design Studio Kindle book which will provide free updates to Design Studio 1.2 later.  A book like Ingo's is good for people such as myself who learn better with a book in front of them.

Today at Reporting 2013 Ingo discussed the SDK's that will be available with Design Studio including one with the Hichert chart; he will be demonstrating this tomorrow at 11:30 at Reporting 2013 if you are attending.

Also check out the SAP Help has been updated for 1.2 as well. 

• Essentials: PAM Additional Information (direct link)
  • in this document you can find the supported systems for data sources, platform and functionality prerequisites.
• Documentation Site (direct link to Help Portal)
  • at this site all relevant documentation documents are available:
    • What's New
      • summary of features delivered with Design Studio 1.2, see
        • What's New Guide
    • Installation, Configuration, Security and Administration Information
      • Installation guides for BI Platform, NetWeaver and Client deployment, see
        • Section for administration guides
    • Development Information
      • All information for Software Development Kit (SDK) of Design Studio, also with package containing simple components build with SDK as examples, see
        • Developer Guide: Design Studio SDK
        • Design Studio SDK Templates and Samples"
    • Application Help
      • contains documentation for application developers, see
        • Application Designer Guide
    • End-User Information and Additional Information
• Release Notes
  • Release note for Initial Shipment (Note 1912710)
    • this note will also be actualized as soon some important information needs to be published
  • Release note for Support Package Schedule (Note 1760372)
• Link to Download Area:
  • Download of initial package (all software components at once - approx. 4GB)
  • Download of SP0 per software component (selective download is possible)

• Official product Tutorials at SCN
• Official Road Map - will be actualized soon based on planning of 1.3 release

Lorenz Wiest, SAP, provided this webcast today to ASUG - it was no PowerPoints, all demonstrations.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

You need a component for an application, but there is not one available in Analytic or Basic components (Figure 1)

The solution is Design Studio SDK

With SDK, you can develop your own custom components

Figure 2: Source: SAP

It is created using JavaScript, HTML5 & CSS

He said there is a tutorial to create components

Example in Figure 2 is a colored box and simple table

There is no need to program in Java

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Figure 3 shows the color box custom component. I may not useful, but illustrates features with custom components

With the color property and on click

Figure 4: Source: SAP

When click, it will turn to blue

You can have your own scripting commands with the custom components as shown in Figure 4

You can set your own visualizations, with additional properties is an HTML page and associate with the CSS files

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Figure 5 shows the simple table custom component example, with 3 more properties added – each column represents a column of the data source

Figure 6: Source: SAP

Figure 6 shows a component animation, a railway clock - see the Display setting on the right.

Google Maps

Google map integrated in custom component

Figure 7: Source: SAP

JavaScript can be used in conjuction with custom components and map mashups as shown in Figure 7.

How can I add custom components?  Under the Menu, Tools > Install Extension to Design Studio, add a zipped file

Figure 8: Source: SAP

Figure 8 shows sample KPI tiles (a custom component) at run time

Figure 9: Source: SAP

Figure 9 shows exceptions and how they were built with the associated with traffic lights

UI5 set

Source: SAP

Above shows some sample UI5 custom components.

Example of a SAP UI5 custom component in Design Studio is shown below:

Source: SAP

How create simple component

Components are based on JavaScript.  You could use a web browser & notepad, but is easier to use an IDE – recommend Eclipse.

You need Design Studio 1.2

Eclipse IDE is free – download from eclipse.org – no special SAP version needed

Samples from SAP – color box, sample table – to get you started - see help.sap.com/boad

Source: SAP

The above shows 5 files. 

Source: SAP

The most important file is contribution.xml – the heart of the custom component – it defines an extension – 1, 2 or many components.

SDK extension is a library – you can pack as many components

Question & Answer

Q: Will RSBBS (jump reports) be part of this or an upcoming version of Design Studio? Currently we use BEx Web Application Designer and can jump (open) tasks that exist in the EC 3.0, from within the WAD report.

A: It is not part of 1.2 - last week we heard they are looking into it for the 1.3 release (planned for May)‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: What types of data source can the design studio connect to?

A: BW, HANA and BI4 single source relational universes‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: how do you configure Datasource with design studio

A: please see tutorials on SCN - sap.com/LearnBI‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: Custom components are part of license or out of it. Where we will locate this code

A: SDK components - if partner - partner has license - asked partners to use SAP Store‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: What's suggested number of records to get a good performance here? < 1000, < 10,000, ...?

A: For SDK component 10K

________________________________________________________________

Q: Where can we learn more about the Design Studio SDK so we can build our own custom components?

A: There is an SDK guide at help.sap.com/boad‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: Is there a data size limit when connecting to BW or BI 4 universe?

A: For DS, no size limit - 10,000 for SDK‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: It might be nice for someone, ASUG, SCN< to host a repository of cool SDK components provided by the user community.  Any thoughts?

Comments?

________________________________________________________________

Q: Is this 100% JScript compatible?

A: Design Studio uses a subset of JavaScript‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: Is there a data size limit when connecting to BW or BI 4 universe?

A: For SDK - 10K data cells ‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: Is there an SVG requirement - is this compatible with IE8 or requires IE9?

A: Design time it requires IE9 - also see the PAM at service.sap.com/PAM‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: is there any dependency on BOXI (version)?

A: Design Studio is platform independent  but if you are using universes they need to be BI4 single source relational universes‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: how would a design studio application be intergated into infoview, for example/ is there a specific type or just added as a URL?

A: You can save your Design Studio application to BI platform and launch it there‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: can it be integrated in BOXI 3.x infoview?

A: I don't think you can save the Design Studio app to BOE XI 3.x - only BI4 and up‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: Is there specific order of components installation (i.e. 1. Design Studio, 2. eclipse, 3. component)?

A: He suggested installing DS 1.2, eclipse and then design your custom component‑

________________________________________________________________

Q: Is this similar SDK that will be for Lumira soon?

A: This is a different SDK for Lumira

________________________________________________________________

Q: Does the Crosstab have conditional formatting and could you select individual cells in the Crosstab.

A: conditional formatting from BEx is supported in DS 1.2

In my last document I described about the way of enhancing Pie chart using Tool Tips. check the document here  Pie Chart - Way to highlight Percentages!

In this blog I will explain the way of enhancing the buttons with CSS feature.

The Buttons do not have the curved feature at the edges. This can be achieved by the CSS in Design Studio.

The CSS classes used for buttons are

sapUiBtn

sapUiBtnFixedWidth

sapUiBtnNorm

sapUiBtnS

sapUiBtnStd

the below classes are involved to change the curve feature of button.

the CSS code for the same is

.sapUiBtnS.sapUiBtnNorm.sapUiBtnStd

{

border-radius : 10px

}

Keep the pixels depends on your requirement. The Graph looks like

Cheers,

Adlin