The Initial View editor in Lumira Designer is one of the mostly used features. However, haven’t you wished you could create calculated measures there? Or add a measure filter, define a BEx exception? Apply some complex filter?

There are so many cool features available at runtime – mainly trough Context Menu that can’t be configured initially for an app. Instead you need complex startup script, bookmarks tricks, or you ask your app’s users to configure the datasource on their own again and again.

Fortunately Lumira Designer 2.3 comes with a secret feature that solves all those problems.

The Control Key Trick

You know how you open the Initial View editor: in the Outline view right click the datasource that you want to configure. Now do the same, but hold the Ctrl key while clicking on “Edit Initial View…”

You’ll see a dialog that essentially contains a Lumira Designer app – we also call it “mini app”:

The app contains a Navigation Panel on the left side and a Crosstab on the right. Thus you can add and remove dimensions as usual by drag-and-drop.

The most important part however is the Context Menu: you can right-on any element in Navigation Panel and Crosstab to see all the analytic operations. E.g. you could click on a column header and exclude a measure:

Calculations

Since Lumira 2.3 SP 2 you can also select two columns and apply a quick calculation: Click in the header of the first column, hold Ctrl and click on the header of the second column. The right-click and chose “Add Calculation” and an operation.

For more advanced calculations you can use “Add Dynamic Calculation” and choosing one of the built-in dynamic calculations. O you use the Custom Calculation dialog:

Note that the example above doesn’t make any sense, as nobody would add two dates. Also note that the available calculations, functions and operators depend on the datasource type.

Formatting and Filtering

You can also add, enable, or edit BEx Exceptions via the Context Menu entry “Conditional Formatting”

Of course you can apply any kind of filters with single members, ranges excluding and including elements. And you can even filter my measure:

Much More

If you click on a Dimension, you can enable and disable hierarchies and later expand and collapse as you like. You can show and hide Display Attributes and Presentations (Key/Text) and configure sorting. You can configure if and how totals are calculated and show. And there is also a Rank feature. For sure there are all the navigation feature like drill-down (set a filter and add a dimension). If there are Drillpath configured, you can also enable them and drill on them.

All changes are stored on the datasource and automatically apply to all charts and tables that are bound to it.

Not all features of the “classic” Initial View Editor are available in the “second” version. But you can freely switch between the two – it just depends on the magic Ctrl key.

Also for Charts

As mentioned changes done by the new Initial View Editor also affect charts. But it is sometimes nicer to do the changes directly on the chart itself.

For sure you know the Chart Configuration:

This mini app now also contains a Context Menu. If the chart option “Allow Data Source Modification” is set to true, you can configure many datasource feature directly here:

You might not find all Context Menu actions here, because charts often don’t have an area that represents e.g. a dimension. But you still might give it a try…