Now that Design Studio 1.6 is available and reiner.hille-doering has shared some of the new goodies for the SDK in his post What's New in Design Studio 1.6 SDK, karol.kalisz and I are getting closer to releasing the next version of our components that are bundled in our releases as the SCN Design Studio SDK Development Community.
What is New?
- About sap.m...
As mentioned by Reiner, Design Studio 1.6 now offers 'official' support for sap.m components (aka the Fiori-like components.) Before, we had a number of Fiori/sap.m-based extensions that we were "hacking" to work in terms of loading, and forcing the events to register. Now that Design Studio supports two 'modes' of BI Applications, the old 'commons' mode, and now the new 'm' (or Main) mode, we have made some adjustments to our existing components and included some new ones, also.
Since the direction is to move eventually to the new 'm' mode, I've chosen to deprecate the sap.m components at this point. I've made sure they continue to work in 'commons' mode for 1.6, but due to eventing and loading differences in 'commons' and 'm' mode, I'll not be maintaining 'commons' mode for any fixes or enhancements for long. I'd suggest if you are looking to use these types of components to consider migrating to 'm' mode when you can.
Now along with the old 'Fiori-like' components, I've added a few new ones:- Fiori Switch
- Fiori Slider
- Fiori Input Field
- Fiori Segmented Button
- Fiori Switch
- About new Complex Property Types and the Additional Properties Sheet...
During Design Studio 1.4/1.5, I wanted to cut down on a lot of the work that it takes to create the Additional Properties Sheet (APS). There are many reasons to need an APS instead of the Default Properties sheet, especially when it comes to complex properties or nested/array-like properties. There's some good potential that has come with 1.6 complex properties which even make the Default Property Sheet a little more usable for properties defined in the new Object/Array format, however there are some limitations such as you cannot set a default value for these new types, and you have to stick to the structure in contribution.xml which means you cannot build deeply nested properties that go down to arbitrary depths for something like a menu path component, etc.
So for 1.6, we still use String properties that are JSON-serialized, with our APS that can express these types of properties in an easy to use way. In the future, our APS will support 'true' complex types, but for now we did not want to introduce regressions for people using our components in existing dashboards.
All that being said, I've taken the opportunity to port some of my older components over to the new APS for consistent look & feel, as well as some of the components developed by others in our SCN development community that didn't have an APS. Examples:- Bring Your Own Data Datasource Component
- Base-64 Encoding Image
(For those unfamiliar, clicking the Upload (Browse) button will base64-encode your image without having to upload it.)
When clicking 'Details':
- Rapid Prototyping Component
I'm working on including some 'Preset' HTML, shown below that will render some common boiler-plate HTML as you see below on the right. On the left is the HTML that is rendered. But that's not all that is new...
I've moved the term placeholders and replacements to a 'Find/Replace' category, along with now an optional new data selections (the ones labeled 'KPI Replacement' to cut down BIAL scripting when you just want to use a KPI selection. The older replacements still exist as 'Manual Replacement'. In the example below, you can see the placeholder term {kpi1} has been replaced by KPI Replacement 1.
- Tag Cloud
I've also enhanced james.rapp's Design Studio Extension: D3 Word Cloud to support the new APS and enhanced it with more properties.
- Arrowed Line
donnie.burhan's Design Studio SDK - Line with Arrow also now works with this new APS:
- Bullet Chart
Like Tag Cloud, I ported over jeroenvandera's Design Studio Extension: Bullet Chart to the new APS pattern.
*Something to note before release, the Measure selectors and Dimension selectors will come as drop downs for ease of use, also we can take the long list and apply sub-tabs for quick location, etc.
- D3 Tree
As a final example, we can see manfred.schwarz's D3 Hierarchy component now works with this APS:
- Others
There are definitely other components that Karol or I are in process of porting over to make more consistent but these were just a few examples I've worked through. Our goal is a more consistent collection.
- Bring Your Own Data Datasource Component
- Optimizations & RequireJS
We're also taking this opportunity to fully embrace the 1.6 full RequireJS support. These are mostly internal changes that nobody will care about expect those of us contributing to this project. Basically, we are using the Require modularization methodology of loading JS and CSS files as-needed per-component. I've actually taken this concept all the way to the APS which means depending on what types of property controls are needed in APS, only those are loaded. This should translate into faster loading APSs and less memory usage.
When is it Coming?
"Soon" :smile: We need to finalize some internal house-keeping topics and plugin clean-up, but my goal would be before end of December.
Questions/Comments/Concerns
Have a problem, idea, question? As always, feel free to drop a line in comments!
- SAP Managed Tags:
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