Design Studio Cookbook for Dashboard Users - ASUG BusinessObjects Conference

[TammyPowlas]

This was an SAP session at the ASUG BusinessObjects User Conference by SAP’s Ian Mayor.  The room was standing-room only, like many of the sessions at this conference.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

An example in Figure 1 to insert multiple queries you need to use Excel formulas like HLOOKUP, VLOOKUP for XCelsius

He said this was easy to do in Design Studio where you can change the query on the fly

However it is easy to manage layout, formatting,  and make it “look pretty” including font size, colors – XCelsius

Style sheets and scripting make things more complex in Design Studio

There are not as many components in Design Studio than XCelsius

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Figure 2 explains some key differences but even better is the figure in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Figure 3 shows the data pipeline

When accessing data through the universe it is like Web Intelligence as it uses micro cubes as a data source, whereas if using the BEx query it uses the Query as a data source

Figure 4: Source: SAP

There was a slide that “style sheets are your friends”.

Create a standard style sheet file, standard, type title, if design standards change, change master file

There is no CSS editor, there are lots of good editors for free on the web (he showed enjoycss.com)

He suggested learning developer tools in browser

Figure 5: Source: SAP

The message for Figure 5 was “don’t fear scripting”.

The CTRL-SPACE wizard helps.

Figure 6: Source: SAP

Figure 6 shows how Design Studio scripting can be simpler than an XCelsius formula using Lookups

CSS tips (shown through a demo):

Use enjoycss.com

In Chrome, when testing CSS, disable cache in developer tools so you can see the CSS refreshed

Figure 7: Source: SAP

There was a brief discussion on this with a suggestion to leverage the SDK.  To learn more I recommend attending SAP TechEd && d-code session EA 211 SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio SDK with former SCN member of the month mike.howles4

Question & Answer

Q: Why drop XCelsius, a product that has been around 12 years?

A: Encountered architectural issues with Flash and Excel model

Online Resources:

BI Tutorials: http://sap.com/learnbi

Online Documentation: http://help.sap.com/boad

Related:

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