SAP Integration Update Part 3 - More Hierarchies with Crystal Reports for Enterprise

[IngoH]

In case you missed the first two entries here the links:

• SAP Integration Update Part 1 - Crystal Reports for Enterprise and SAP NetWeaver BW
• SAP Integration Update Part 2 - Crystal Reports for Enterprise and Hierarchies from SAP NetWeaver BW

For the following items lets assume that you did complete SAP Integration Update Part 2 - Crystal Reports for Enterprise and Hierarchies from SAP NetWeaver BW and have a hierarchy from your SAP NetWeaver BW system in Crystal Reports for Enterprise. So we created a data request including all out members from the hierarchy.

In addition to showing how you connect to the hierarchy using Crystal Reports for Enterprise, I wanted to share now some of the new hierarchical capabilities.

First we are going to create a new crosstab in Crystal Reports.

You will notice that Crystal Reports is now able to leverage the hierarchy for the crosstab as well. In our example we define a crosstab showing the hierarchy "Country Hierarchy 1" in the rows with the Net Value as the value. Like before hte type of aggregation is automatically set to "delegated" to ensure the totals are being leveraged from SAP BW.

Below you can see the result. All hierarchy levels are shown automatically.

The second part I would ike to share here in regards to hierarchies is the usage of hierarchies in charts. In our given example I decided to create a new bar chart for my report.

After simply dragging and dropping the elements I would like to see in my chart from the Data Explorer, I can start definig the details.

So for my chart I defined the Category to leverage the Country Hierarchy 1 and set the hierarchy type to be "external hierarchy" and the result...

... is clearly leveraging the hierarchy and also showing the values according to the hierarchical sorting.

One of the items often requested right now is a hierarchical prompting in the Crystal Reports Designer and below you can see a hierarchy variable.....

combined with a hiearchy node variable - showing a nice hierachical selection of nodes and leafs.

I hope that you enjoyed this short overview of some of the new hierarchical capabilities. In the next blog we will use BEx queries with custom structures and take a look how Crystal Reports for Enterprise can leverage the structure elements.