Teched 2013 Amsterdam: Impressions about Design Studio

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.