Design Studio 1.3 Q&A Chat Replay

We did our SAP Design Studio 1.3 Q&A chat for SAPinsider last night, which was a lot of fun. If you weren’t able to join us, you can check the ‘replay’ here. Later this week also an edited transcript of the chat will be posted.

Update: The transcript is available!

What Is New in Design Studio 1.3 Q&A chat

Jeroen van der A and I are hosting a Q&A chat session on SAP Design Studio 1.3 for SAPinsider on Tuesday 17 June 2014 at 12:30pm-1:30pm EDT (18:30pm-19:30pm CET). If you want to join the live discussion you can register here. That’s also the place where you can already add some questions or topics you want to discuss.

What Is New in Design Studio 1.3? Q&A with the Authors of Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio

How does SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio compare to SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius), Analysis for Office, and BEx WAD? What are the features you should look for from the new Design Studio 1.3 release?

Register now for our June 17 online Q&A with Xavier Hacking and Jeroen van der A, authors of Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio. 

Ask your questions in this online author chat at 12:30pm-1:30pm EDT on the 17th, and post your technical questions on building dashboards using Design Studio, new features in 1.3, and how Design Studio compares to other BusinessObjects tools, including:

• What can we handle planning models in BW via Design Studio?
• How does Design Studio compare to Lumira, Analysis for Office, and Dashboards?
• How do I work with variable scripting and background processing?
• How does Design Studio handle responsive design and other mobility requirements?
• What is new with our scripting options in 1.3?

We’re looking forward to a great discussion on evaluating and using Design Studio 1.3. Register here.

New SAPexperts article: How to Use CSS in Design Studio

I wrote another article for the SAPexperts online knowledge base. In line with some of my recent posts here on my blog this one is all about CSS, but now more from a basic, 101 course standpoint.

In this article I give a basic introduction to the language of CSS and explain how it can be used in combination with Design Studio, either on a local installation or with a connection to an SAP BusinessObjects BI4 platform or an SAP NetWeaver BW environment. I also discuss how you can change the default CSS styles of the standard Design Studio components.

If you have an subscription to the SAPexperts BI hub you can check the article here.

Custom Scrollbars in SAP Design Studio

As we have seen in an earlier post we can enhance the looks of our SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio applications with the use of some CSS coding. In this post I will show you how to add scrollbars to Design Studio components and how to change the looks of them. The result of an adjusted Text component will look like this:

Some components, like the Crosstab or the Filter Panel component will activate horizontal and/or vertical scrollbars themselves when there is not enough room to display all the data. The Text component doesn’t do this and just simply expands vertically. The height setting in the component’s layout properties has no effect on this anymore.

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DIY CSS navigation buttons in SAP Design Studio

In SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio you can use the container components like a Tabstrip or a Pagebook to organize your application. The Tabstrip component already includes the tabs for navigation between the pages. For the Pagebook component we have to create our own navigation buttons.

You can use the standard button components, but these have a pretty basic look. In this example I will show you how to create your own custom navigation buttons with some CSS code and a tiny bit of JavaScript.

We will create two buttons. The button for the selected page should have a blue color, the unselected button should be white. Also, when the user hovers the unselected button with the cursor, the button should turn blue.

For this we need three CSS statements. You can add these to your custom CSS file:

• .button_show
• .button_show:hover
• .button_selected

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