SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio: The Comprehensive Guide (2nd edition) coming early 2016

SAP Design Studio has changed and improved a lot over the past three years; arriving at version 1.6 last month. It was clear that our 2013 book Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio needed a big update, as it included only the features up until Design Studio version 1.1.

So the wait is almost over and in early 2016 the fully updated and extended version of the book will be available under the name SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio: The Comprehensive Guide (2nd edition). Make sure you create some room in your bookcase because with about 750 pages this book has gotten really fat. For this project I teamed up with my Interdobs colleagues and Design Studio specialists Jeroen van der A and Dwain Chang.

I will post some more info on the book as we approach the release date. Below is already the outline from the SAP Press and Amazon page.

SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio: The Comprehensive Guide

750 pages, 2nd, updated and revised edition 2016, Print edition hardcover
ISBN 978-1-4932-1297-2

SAP Press | Amazon.com | Goodreads

Breathe some life into your analysis applications and dashboards with this guide to SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio! Updated for release 1.6, this second edition is jam-packed with the need-to-know details for report developers and designers from using the IDE to implementing CSS styles and classes. Enhance your applications even further with information on advanced scripting and SDK extensions. It’s time to take your BI to the next level are you ready?

* Walk through installation, configuration, and usage scenarios
* Build full-scale applications for planning, OLAP analysis, and more
* Learn how to use and develop SDK extensions

Installation and Configuration
Install the system and the Design Studio Client Tool, then walk through configuration steps for SAP BusinessObjects BI, SAP Enterprise Portal, SAP Business Warehouse, SAP HANA, universes, and custom data sources.

Designing and Building Applications
Learn how to integrate planning functionality into your applications, use CSS for further customization and artistic flair, and master design principles for complex, performance-tuned applications.

The Software Development Kit
Explore Design Studio s SDK for custom extensions. See how to install, update, and deploy SDK extensions and build components.

Highlights include:

• Installation and configuration
• Capabilities and use cases
• Applications, reports, dashboards
• Components and properties
• Scripting
• Planning applications
• CSS
• SDK
• Integrated Development Environment
• Design Studio vs. Dashboards vs. BEx WAD

SAP Design Studio minor roadmap update 2015.12.04

A minor update on the latest SAP Design Studio roadmap was made available this week: revision 2015.12.04. I compared this new roadmap with the previous version (2015.10.23).

1. As Design Studio 1.6 is now available, a ‘further information’ slide is added (slide #27).

2. The Future Direction slide now also makes a statement on the HANA Connector (#53):

 SAP recommends to use the http-based HANA Connector (introduced in version 1.5) going forward. The former HANA connector will not be extended further and hence will not expose newer HANA features to the front-end.

3. They forgot to put in a slide on the Right to Left support in Design Studio 1.6 (#53).

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A look at Design Studio 1.6: Integrated CSS editor

SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.6 has just been released, so it is time to really check out the new features myself! I’ll start with one of the more hidden features in the previews/roadmaps, but in my opinion a very imported productivity gainer: the integrated custom CSS-file editor.

Using a custom CSS-file in Design Studio was pretty frustrating. You had to edit the file in a tool like Notepad++ and upload it to the BI Platform via the Application’s properties; a lot of repeating manual steps. Let’s have a look at how SAP improved this in this update.

Design Studio 1.6 has a new button Edit Custom CSS… in the menu bar.

After clicking this button a CSS-file can be selected from the BI Platform, or a new (empty) CSS-file can be created on the BI Platform.

The CSS-file opens in a new tab. Just as with the Design Studio apps, the asterisk (*) sign before the file name indicates that the file has been changed and hasn’t been saved yet. Here we can define the custom CSS classes. As you can see in the screenshots below, the editor supports syntax coloring/formatting: comments are italic and blue, class names are green,  properties are purple, property values are italic and blue etc.

Also, just as in the Script Editor for JavaScript we can use the CTRL-SPACE shortcut to show proposals for CSS properties and values. This will increase development speed, as less errors will be made searching for the correct syntax and less checking of the W3Schools CSS reference is necessary.

In the examples below I activated the content assistance after typing font and font-weight.

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SAP Design Studio/Eclipse on Retina Mac with Window 10 in Parallels resolution issue

I’m running a virtual machine version of Windows 10 in Parallels 11 on my Mac. The MacBook has this cool high res super sharp retina screen.

Problem is that Eclipse, and thus SAP Design Studio somehow cannot cope with this: all icons from the icon bar and the components on the layout editor are suddenly extremely small. Unworkable small. Also the popup windows are all weirdly cropped. And I’m not the only one with this issue. Changing the resolution settings in Windows didn’t help.

The solution/workaround for my specific situation eventually was pretty easy. It only took me a few months to stumble upon it, sigh… Parallels has an option in the View menu to switch the Retina Resolution. Put it on Scaled and the resolution is again Eclipse/Design Studio compatible.

Now let’s hope the next version of Eclipse/Design Studio fixes this, as it is the only tool that gives me these kinds of problems and I really want to use the retina screen where it is created for.

SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.6 Preview

SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.6 is coming up later this quarter so it is time to do a little previewing! You can find the full roadmap for Design Studio here. Below I’ll discuss the highlights of all the new features that we can expect.

New Scorecard component

Design Studio 1.6 brings a new component that we have seen before in Xcelsius (SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards): the Scorecard component, or formatted table. This component can display multiple visualizations on a single table row. A table can display multiple of these rows, for example for each product type or region a separate row. We can show simple numbers but also charts (micro charts/trend lines without x/y-axis). Exceptions as defined in the underlying BEx Query can be shown as trend icons, colored text or colored cell backgrounds.

Very very useful if you want to display a lot of performance indicators in a compact way. Should also be easy to develop as you now only need a single scorecard component to achieve this, instead of using multiple text, chart etc. components to to the same.

New Spreadsheet component

A bit of a surprise is this new Spreadsheet component. It has the same functionality as the Crosstab component, so it can display data and has a context menu with all the OLAP features (filter, sort etc.). Difference is that you can now copy and paste data to and from this component. This is meant for planning scenarios, where you have to enter values (the planning template also uses the spreadsheet component). Now you can copy the data from a Design Studio app to Excel, make some adjustments there, and copy and paste them back into the spreadsheet component in the Design Studio app and use the planning functionality to save the data. The component also really looks like a familiar spreadsheet environment as in MS Excel, so that is also a plus. There is no info on using formulas or such as we are used to in Excel.

Geo pie charts

You can now use custom point markers (images) in the Geo Map component. Also pie charts can be plotted on the geo layers. Don’t use this, as pie charts suck.

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