August 29, 2016 5 minute read

Parent/child relationships in Business Process Operations dashboards

This blog describes in some more detail the steps 7-9 that were mentioned in Best Practices: Creating Management Dashboards

You should be already aware that something like Business Process Operations dashboards exist for some years. Perhaps you also played around with virtual characteristics and the drill-down within dashboards is perhaps still something new for you. In the above mentioned Best Practices blog the steps 7-9 are perhaps a little bit too concise to do it in your environment. So let’s elaborate a little bit more on this.

You have have panels and analytical key figure instances defined according to your needs, perhaps similar to what was described in step 1-6 of the Best Practices blog. Now you would like to provide some drill-down capabilities to the dashboard end user. Normally the underlying key figure should remain the same and you just want to show the same data somewhat more filtered and/or according to different characteristic values / dimensions. The AKFI screenshot below shows that a virtual characteristic is assigned as Category and some threshold values were defined to have the rating table cells colored in green, yellow and red. The easiest way is now to copy this (parent) AKFI to a new one so that the key figure, connector instance, filtering and threshold values are taken over and you do not have to maintain it another time.

Now your new (child) AKFI got all this information inherited from the parent and you only need to specify

How the data shall be displayed differently (i.e. exchange the characteristic values for Category (here: Company Code) and/or Drilldown (here: Calendar month)
Which data from the parent AKFI should be used dynamically to filter the child accordingly (here: Runtime filter on Market)

For the new (child AKFI) you also have to create a corresponding (child) panel where you state how exactly the data shall be visualized (which chart type).

In a last step you have to actually interlink the two AKFIs. You do this on panel level where you assign now the (child) panel as Detail Panel to the corresponding entry in the (parent) panel.

If you did all this for all AKFIs and panels in the dashboard, then you can finally check the result. When you call your dashboard now via

http://<server>:<port>/sap/bc/webdynpro/sap/ags_ri_dashboard?PIF_DASHBOARD_TECHNAME=<technical name of the dashboard>

you see your initial (parent) panel with the assigned (parent) AKFIs.

Now that you defined some child panel you see an additional push button “Child Panel”. When you click now into the respective cell of interest, then the (parent) panel checks which detail panel needs to be called and when calling the detail panel the newly defined runtime filter is applied and handed over, so in our case the market information is handed over and only company code assigned to this market are displayed.

Parent/child relationships in Business Process Operations dashboards

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