Archive for August, 2011

Create your own webi report part viewer using HTML DIVs

Published by Ron Keler in Web Intelligence on August 30th, 2011 | No Comments »

Very often i run into the need to embed a webi report part, such as a table block, in a separate application, outside of InfoView. There are many ways to accomplish this, from leveraging the webi REBean SDK to using the openDocument api. The openDocument api in particular is very handy, since it is so easy and simple to use, and requires no coding. However, in many cases, all that is needed is the report block to be displayed on a screen, rather than the entire webi interface. Using some carefullt placed HTML placed DIVs, you can accomplish that.
While the openDocument api does have the ability to display specific report parts, using the sReportPart argument, it provides only limited functionality. It is officially only supported for Crystal (although it does work with webi as well), but fails to include some of the important controls that come with webi such as pagination, filters, saving and zooming. Leveraging html DIVs, you can “hide” the elements of the webi page that you are not interested in showing, and create a webi presentation, with no coding, that can be included in an external web application.


In the example captured above, you can see an Xcelsius selector with a webi table underneath. The selector uses an EIC to pass a parameter value to the webi report part using the openDocument api and a JS function reloads the webi iFrame when the EIC value changes. DIVs are used to cover up all the webi “extra” unwanted elements, and expose selected menu options as well as the table block.
You can find here the sample files, zipped (xlf, swf, html and .wid, based on e-Fashion).

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SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook review

Published by Ron Keler in Xcelsius on August 22nd, 2011 | 1 Comment »

I was recently asked by Packt Publishing to review Xavier Hacking and David Lai “SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook”. I just finished reading the book, and wanted to share some thoughts.
This is a tremendous resource for Xcelsius developers. The format of a “recipe book” is a wonderful idea, and is perfect for folks who are looking to become effective with Xcelsius very quickly, looking for a point solution to an immediate problem, or just needing some creative inspiration when working on their dashboard.
You can skim through the list of recipes and pick the ones you are interested in “cooking up”. The electronic format makes is very simple to find relevant information, rather than flipping through pages, i could use the find functionality to quickly look for a specific topic.
The recipes cover a wide array of topics, starting with topics relevant to beginners who are looking to understand fundamental best practices, to advanced users who are looking for new creative ways to extend their repertoire of Xcelsius tricks. The book covers pretty much the entire spectrum of dashboard development from components, to the model, excel, data connectivity, publishing and even third party tools. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and am very impressed by the breadth of coverage. This is a wonderful reference applicable to any Xcelsius developer.

The book is available in from many places on the web, the publisher’s web apge for it is at: http://www.packtpub.com/sap-businessobjects-dashboards-4-0-cookbook/book

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Use Crystal Reports Data Consumer and subreports to burst complex Xcelsius dashboards

Published by Ron Keler in Crystal Reports, Xcelsius on August 15th, 2011 | 4 Comments »

More often than not Xcelsius dashboard developers are being asked to come up with ways to burst the dashboard. It makes perfect sense. Dashboards are typically high level executive summaries, designed for management consumption, and managers typically prefer to have information pushed to them then go pulling  for it. The more “executive” the dashboard is, the stronger the requirement to be able to “email” the dashboard is. The problem is that at the moment, with BOE version 3.x, there is no native way to schedule and email Xcelsius dashboards. They are designed to be consumed online. There are third party tools that can handle this (like InfoSol), but if you are looking to stay within the constraints of the “out-of-the-box” BOE platform, this can be quite a challenge.
One way to work around this problem is to leverage Crystal Reports as the “container” for the dashboard. You can use Crystal for two purposes:
1. Crystal reports that embed Xcelsius .swf files CAN be scheduled and bursted, as PDF for example, from InfoView
2. You can connect Xcelsius to live data using the Crystal Reports Data Consumer connection to get data from the universe populated in real time into the dashboard
The main limitation on the Crystal Reports Data Consumer connection is that you can only have one of those in any .xlf file. Well, luckily, Crystal provides a good solution to that problem in the way of subreports. You can create multiple .swf files and “connect” them in a single master Crystal reports as individual subreports.


There are additional limitations to this approach, and highly complex dashboard will not lend themselves to this method, but for moderately complex dashboards that require combining multiple data sets that span different granularities, this can be a simple and clean solution.
You can find the sample .xlf, .swf and .rpt files here. The samples use the e-Fashion universe for live data

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Generate QR Codes in Webi or Crystal Reports

Published by Ron Keler in Web Intelligence on August 8th, 2011 | 3 Comments »

QR Codes are quickly becoming a standard method of communication. QR Codes are two dimensional bar codes that allow QR readers to translate the encoded data and take actions on it. Any camera equipped smart phone today can easily read a QR code. For example, QR Codes are used to automatically add contacts from business to the phone. You can open websites and pass all sorts of data using QR codes. They are super popular in Japan and Asia and are now getting traction in the US, really really fast.
One thing QR codes can help with in terms of BI is making reports actionable. QR Codes can be used to allow information consumers to go to a certain website page, or web application, submitting information they read on the report, scan a code and send an email notification, or as in my example, provide a quick way to add contact information into the phone contacts list.
Using the sample eFashion universe, I created a simple report that contains the stores, store managers, and some sales and margin stats. Then, i created a vcard encoded string containing the  store manager info, address etc. Finally, i used the vcard string as the input into the google charts api to generate a QR code image, and used that image in a webi report, as well as a crystal report.
You can download sample crystal report .rpt file or web intelligence .wid file that contain these examples.

        

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Xcelsius Count Down Clock

Published by Ron Keler in Xcelsius on August 1st, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Not much to say about this one, just decided to do a count down clock in xcelsius. You can download the XLF HERE and modify the end date and text as you please…

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