Design Studio 1.6 Feature Sneak Preview – CSV Data Sources and Exploration Template
There is a demo app, built my colleagues on the Design Studio PM team, Christina Mast and Bettina Denonville, that we’ve been showing to customers lately. I’d like to share it with the community for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it demonstrates the kind of things that Design Studio is capable of, in the hands of a skilled designer, when extensions are brought into the mix. The application in question uses a couple of components from the Design Studio SDK Development Community. Specifically, it uses the Facet Filter Component and the Date Range Slider, to build a data exploration app. The user interface is dynamic, allowing the user to toggle between chart, crosstab and chart/crosstab combo display, while expanding and collapsing the chart picker and navigation page as desired. With the data range slider, the user can, with the flick of a mouse or a finger, set the desired data range. With the facet filter, the user can perform guided data exploration in the style of Lumira or Explorer, but in a custom application.
But that’s not the real reason for this post. If you download app and look at it in the designer, you notice that it carries its own data with it. This is the first sneak preview of Design Studio 1.6’s CSV data provider. This is a useful data source to use, if there are only small amounts of data and it is static.
Prerequisites:
- Design Studio 1.5 SP1. (this version can consume existing CSV data sources, but the UI machinery to create new data sources will be available in 1.6)
- The Design Studio SDK Community Extension pack needs to be installed. The easiest way to do this is to select Tools -> Install Extension to Design Studio… and enter the URL for the Community SDK extension pack’s installer URL.
Installation:
- Clone the project from Github, or download it as a ZIP and extract it.
- Copy the contents of the zip (the .csv files and the BIAPP) to the root of the Design Studio repository. The CSV files should reside in ..\Analysis-workspace\com.sap.ip.bi.zen\repository and not in the app directory itself as in the picture below. (I have 6 .csv files, as this is not the only app I have that uses CSV data sources. The data exploration app uses 4).
Import/Export does not yet work with CSV data sources, so you have to install it the old fashoned way.
Awesome! A physical CSV versus my BYO Data approach where I basically embed CSV should mean a lighter weight BI App file, but more importantly, reusable across multiple dashboards if I'm reading your post correctly? Thank you for the sneak peak.
Hi David,
This is indeed a very useful feature. One question for my understanding. I am assuming that in the demo app you've described, a main benefit and reason for using the Design Studio SDK Community Facet Filter component is that it has built-in support for cascading filters whereas the setFilter() script method or property binding feature (for say dropdown boxes) do not support cascading filtering for CSV data sources (as is also the case for universe data sources). Is my understanding correct?
Thanks,
Mustafa.
Hi David ,
Just a doubt in mind , will it work if we replace the existing CSV with a file generated using script (same name). This way we can schedule a file with live data to the BI server on need basis so dashboard need not to fire against the database .,
Thanks ,
Sateesh.
HI David,
nice to see SAP playing "catch up" when it comes to local files. Just being able to share a local CSV file won't be enough in most cases, which is why for our Custom Data Source Extension we allow people to use Google Sheets, or shared items on DropBox and Box
regards
Ingo Hilgefort, Visual BI
interesting! Looking forward to test it. So just to be sure, we can't test this until SP1 comes out (next week?), right?
This is a great data exploration template!
I am having a problem downloading the app - After following the provided link, I see the message below.
Who do I contact for access? Does anyone have a solution to this ?
Access to share has expired
Share is no longer available; contact the owner if you need access
It's on Github now: davidhstocker/SAP_DESIGN_STUIDO_DATA_EXPLORATION_DEMO · GitHub
Hi All,
As the SAP Mobile docs folder is out of date and has expired, I've pushed the project to Github.
Cheers,
Dave
Hi,
I can't import the ZIP file in Design Studio, Bcoz there is no XML file available.
How can i do it is there any other way to import the data.
Hi Keerthy,
Already above the same content folks mentioned. please check it.
"Import/Export does not yet work with CSV data sources, so you have to install it the old fashioned way".