SAP Design Studio and charts and data sources

[IngoH]

Today - after a few Design Studio forum discussion - I thought I am going to share another little feature of our upcoming Design Studio Extensions (... I know still waiting for Christmas, but its coming soon...)

Very often you will end up in a situation where your data source could be used for more than just a single component, if Design Studio would allow you to define a view per component, but that is not possible today. A data source can be used for several components and you can select a measure for a specific chart, but you can not select the dimension.

So we added a "Data Utility" tool to our chart components.

Figure 1: Data Source

So lets start with the data source as shown in Figure 1, which contains as dimensions the Product Group, Product Category, and Product. In addition the data source contains Cost and Net Value as measures.

Figure 2: Chart

A default chart with all the measures and dimensions from the data source would look something similar like Figure 2 - which is not what we want.

Figure 3: Data Utility

So lets navigate to the Advanced Properties of our chart component and enable the Data Utility.

Figure 4: Data Utility

The Data Utility tool is then allowing me to specify which dimensions I would like to use for this particular chart and which measure I would like to use (see Figure 4 and Figure 5).

Figure 5: Select Measure

So after we selected the dimension - in this example the Product Group - and the measure, our chart looks like shown below in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Chart

Figure 7: Multiple Charts

So because I can specify this per chart I can easily have multiple charts - as shown in Figure 7 - pointing to a single data source (see Figure 😎

Figure 8: Data Source

I am sure there are some people that are now thinking that this is basically aggregating the numbers on the client - and yes that is what it offers and for sure there will now be people that are going to come back and say that this won't work in the case of an exception aggregation of - for example - HR Headcount in BW - and that is correct......but......

this tool provides you with an option to aggregate data on the fly so that you don't have to create multiple connections in Design Studio to achieve this.

Is it the perfect solution for everything - No it is not and the reason behind this is, that so far that the Design Studio SDK does not provide any information about the actual aggregation type of the measures. If that is being added to the meta-data, I am sure we can easily enhance this to leverage the new information.

For now we will give you the option to use some simple aggregation options and use a single source for several charts.

You can find out more about the Design Studio Extensions here.