I am sure most of you have been in situations where you need an indicator as part of the first visible area of your dashboard showing the status of a set of KPIs.
Currently SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio does not provide something "out of the box" for such a scenario and I have seen people using Textboxes and assigning the color dynamically, or using the image component and showing different images dynamically - but so far there is nothing out of the box.
That is where one of our new components can help.
The Trend Icon allows you to assign a data selection to the component and you can then configure the default behaviour.
The default behaviour allows you to configure the Trend Icon Label and the position of the label (Right / Left) and you can configure the default icon.
You can choose from a set of pre-delivered icons and you can then choose the colour and the angle for the icon itself.
So after setting up my two Trend Icons, they still look very basic and are so far not acting on any of the incoming data.
That is where the conditional formatting of the component helps.
The Conditional Formatting allows you to setup rules based on a Single Measures, a Measure Calculation, or a Target Value definition. In the example above I created a Target Value definition where I am comparing the assigned value (Revenue for Q1 2016) to the Budget value of the Revenue for Q1 2016.
I can then setup several rules - as shown above - and in each rule I can define the Icon itself, the colour for the icon, the size, and the angle.
In that way my Trend Icon reacts dynamically based on the actual data that is being returned from the assigned data source.
You can find out more about advanced capabilities of our Extensions here:
100 Things you can do with Visual BI Extensions and SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio