A look at Design Studio 1.6: Integrated CSS editor

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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.

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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.

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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.

dscss3 

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HackingSAP.com | SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio

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

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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.

Design Studio small 1

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.

Design Studio small 2

Design Studio small 3

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.

HackingSAP.com | SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio

SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.6 Preview

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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.

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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.

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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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HackingSAP.com | SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio

SAP BI4.2 What’s New

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Some interesting What’s New slides on SAP BusinessObjects BI4.2 appeared this week. You can check the high-level info slides here, the slides with a bit more detail here, and if you are really hardcore you can find the 150 slides ultimate edition here.

You can also go through my tweets with all the highlights and my comments:

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HackingSAP.com | SAP BusinessObjects

SAP Design Studio Roadmap minor – but interesting – update

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To my surprise a new roadmap for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio was published last week: version July 22 2015. This is only two months after the previous update (May 5 2015) and it is still covering the same current 1.5 release. You can find the roadmap here (S-account required).

I went through it and made some comparisons:

HackingSAP.com | SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio