Visual BI Extensions - New Slider Component

[IngoH]

Some of you might have started working with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio (Design Studio) with previous knowledge and projects on the Web Application Designer and some of you might have started in Design Studio with previous experience in SAP Dashboards (former Xcelsius).

Especially if you have developed dashboards in SAP Dashboards previously, you most likely integrated a component into your dashboard which so far does not exist as an out of the box component with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio - a simple slider.

As part of our next package of extensions we created now a Slider component that is able to offer several advanced functionalities.

In general the slider component is able to create three different types of sliders:

• Slider based on numeric data
• Slider based on Date values
• Slider based on Dimension members

So lets create a slider based on numeric information:

After we added the Slider component to our dashboard in Design Studio we can open the Additional Properties (shown below)

Here we can decide:

• if we would like to setup a Single or a Dual Slider
• if we would like to setup a Horizontal or Vertical Slider

In our example we setup a Dual Slider going from 0 (Minimum Value) to 100 (Maximum Value) and we define the default start and default end values as a range going from 20 to 80.

Simple as that.

So if we now change the Type of Slider to the option Date, we have the following options to us:

Not only can we now configure a Minimum and Maximum Value for our Slider, we also have the option to define the exact format for the Display, Input, Return Value.

• Display Format refers to the actual display of the date value
• Return Format is the value format for the scripting and filtering
• Input Format is the value format that is used in the Additional Properties.

We can also specify the granularity of the slider - which for our example is the Day / Date option.

In our example we configure the display with a short weekday name, the full month name, and the year value.

For the Return Format you have similar options like you can leverage in Microsoft Excel for formatting date values.

So now lets look at the third options and we change the Slider Type to "Data Points" and we assign a data source to it.

So in our example we have a Dimension Product and as soon as we assign the data source to the Slider component, the user can select the Dimension Product or the Dimension Measures.

So after assigning it the user gets the dimension members displayed as part of the slider and could use the dimension members for example as a filter value.

In addition to all those features, the slider also provides the option to setup a Conditional Formatting.

You can setup conditional formatting for the Slider Scale, Slider Background, Slider Handle, or the Slider Tooltip and you can decide to use Static values, or Percentage values in relation to the Maximum, or you can configure a Target Value definition where you can define ranges based on target value achievement.

Above is a Slider going from 0 to 200 with several conditional formatting ranges defined for the Slider Scale.

I hope that I was able to show what is possible with the slider and how it can help - especially for projects moving from SAP Dashboards to SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio.

A collection of blogs showing additional functionality provided by Visual BI Extensions is available here:

100 Things you can do with Visual BI Extensions and SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio