With the 1.1 in GA I promised to look at the new features. As I was busy last week to write about all the great sessions in BI2013 this new piece is a bit later than I intended, but there you are.
After looking last time at CSS I will now look at the variables and calculations. With these you have a lot of new possibilities for reporting, but also to put controls in place that you can use to run the application.
How to set up variables
The variables are set up either in the application component for global variables. These can be used anywhere in the application or locally. These have to be declared in the component where you intend to use them and cannot be used anywhere else.
In this example we set up a couple of parameter variables so the application can receive parameters and 3 locals to transfer the parameters to. The other variables are meant to be used to check on the parameters and do scripting based on their value.
In the application on start up handler we will set up a filter based on the number of passed parameters. If you pass “Monday”, “Tuesday” the filter will pick up those two. If you add “Wednesday” the filter will also use the third parameter. I’ve used the filter setup as described by Tammy powlas in her document here : http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-42789
As you can see we first transfer the parameters to internal variables. In the second step we check if there are actually values passed in the parameter. If so we calculate with the Var_no_Filters variable so we can later set the right filter based on the number of parameters. Finally we actually set the filter.
In this example we used variables and a little calculation to receive and process external parameters to set a filter in our application. By checking the parameters and counting the ones actually filled we were able to set up a flexible filter. Any external device can now pass filters, for example another application, a website or even a SAP Dashboard flash file.