Tips & tricks
SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards: Using the Push Button for month input
I got a mail this morning about a blogpost I wrote 2,5 years ago in which I explained how you can use the Push Button component in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to increase or decrease a value. The question in the mail was if and how this example could be transformed into a month selector, where the minus button would set February back to January and the plus button would do this the other way around.
There are two challenges here: How to get the names of the months to be shown (and not just the numbers) and how to limit the model to only work between the lowest (January) and highest (December) possible value.[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://www.hackingsap.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/push_button_months_small.swf” width=”300″ height=”” targetclass=”flashmovie”]
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To solve this I used a Source Data component. This is a ‘hidden’ component that can move data based on a index number. To set this up I put all the months in the spreadsheet and for clarity I put the corresponding index numbers in front of them. Note: The Source Data component starts with index 0!
As you can see in the two screenshots below I selected the cells with the months [B5:B16] as my source data from which one cell value has to be inserted into destination [D2]. Item Index [C2] determines which value that should be. In the screenshots the index number is 0, so “Jan” should be displayed in [D2].
Xcelsius: Using the Push Button for data input
Xcelsius is a great tool to build interactive what-if scenarios based on MS Excel models. We recently got a request to build such a dashboard and one of the user interface requirements was that the user should be able to change a value by clicking something like a +/- button. Clicking the plus had to increase the value with 1, and clicking the min had to decrease it with 1.
Luckily, Xcelsius provides us the Spinner component. This would have been a good and easy solution, if another 
requirement wouldn’t have been that the dashboard had to be used on a (multi)touch screen. Touch means big buttons for user input and as you can see on the right, the Spinner component is way too detailed. So we needed something else to do the job.
To solve this we used the new Push Button components. The Push Button simply does what its name says and pushes a value from a source cell to a destination cell. To solve our little problem we used two of these Push Buttons and some basic MS Excel logic.
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Posted in: DIY, Knowledge sharing, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, Xcelsius
