How to add custom measures to the Charts in Design Studio?

In this blog I would like to show you, how you can add custom measures to the charts in Design Studio.

Usually adding custom measures to your dashboard is done by using the BEx Query Designer (in case of SAP BW) or by using calculation views (in case of SAP HANA)

Design Studio 1.6 offers this feature of adding a calculation via the context menu for the crosstab. Still, the scope of this feature is limited so far to the runtime of the standard crosstab. However via a Custom SDK extension, we can extend this feature to the charts as well and also extend this to the design time.

Our extension named What If Analyzer – part of our Visual BI Extensions Suite – enables the user to add a calculation as a measure into the chart.

Let’s consider a scenario where the data source has  key figures Cost Price and Selling price for the Characteristic “Item” and the user wants to display the Selling Price and a calculated measure Profit in a Chart.

Datasource:

Chart:

The chart below is showing our measure Selling Price along the dimension Item.

Steps to add Custom Calculation:

  1.Drag and drop the What If Analyser into the Application and it looks like below.

In the additional property of the What if Analyser, there will be two tabs.

1.Scenario

2.Components

All Charts assigned with the Data source same as that of “What if Analyzer” can be added with custom calculations and what if analysis can be done. In this Example , the Column Chart is assigned with the Data source which is assigned to the What if Analyzer.

Select the Chart by checking the Check box.

As per the scenario, a new measure “Profit” needs to be added into the chart based on the calculation Profit = (Selling  Price – Cost Price)

So when we add a calculation, then it will be added to the measure category.

Now the chart will look like the below

You final chart looks as below with the added custom measure, “Profit”.

Here’s a short video showing the steps to add a calculation into the Chart using the What If Analyzer.

Apart from the above discussed functionality, What If Analyzer does What if analyses similar to MS excel and provides few other interesting options.