I wanted to drop a quick post to let our community know that due to an overwhelming request, we have decided to hold another session of our Xcelsius Advanced Developer Workshop.
Mike Alexander (Author, Crystal Xcelsius For Dummies) and Loren Abdulezer(Author, Xcelsius Best Practices) will host a 2-day Xcelsius Advanced Developer Workshop, September 2010 in Dallas, TX! This workshop sold out in March so make sure you get in early. Here, you will get a ton of advanced Xcelsius tips and techniques – such as:
• Learn how to enhance your data models with advanced Excel functions
• Learn powerful dashboard design and charting techniques
• Learn tricks that will help to optimize the performance of your Xcelsius dashboards
• Connect to databases using full XML connectivity (Not just XML Maps)
• Embed Xcelsius dashboards into Excel and Access
• Learn how to pass parameters from one Xcelsius dashboard to another
• Learn how create detailed drill-throughs in Xcelsius using encoded URLs
• Learn how to use your Xcelsius dashboards to write back to your server Much more… Sign up before September 1st and get 25% discount off registration!
We look forward to seeing you.
By the way: Leading up to this event, I will be posting some cool new tips and tricks here, so stay tuned!
During my time as a custom UI component developer for Xcelsius, I have encountered user interface styling and skinning loss at Xcelsius runtime and recently spoke to several developers who have experienced this issue as well. Fortunately, the workaround to preserve styles is fairly easy to apply.
The problem:
You may develop a button, canvas, list box, tree viewer or other UI component in Flex, apply inline styling directives, package it up for use in Xcelsius and view it in the Xcelsius designer without issue. However, when you enter runtime mode in Xcelsius, your component may lose some or all of its inline styles, rendering it partially unusable or invisible. This is due to the parent Flex Xcelsius application inadvertently stripping away styles at runtime.
The solution:
For a generic solution to skinning and styling reapplication, you’ll need to reference in your project library path, the haloclassic.swc swc in the Flex SDK directory (a path similar to this C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\2.0.1\frameworks\themes\haloclassic.swc). Once you have referenced the swc, create a CSS file for your component(s) that specifies all of the default skins and styles to their halo default or desired style as shown in the sample code below (full code here). This set of steps will need to be implemented as needed on a per-component basis if your components are experiencing style loss. Once you have defined your CSS file, the next step is to reference it in your component file as you would any other CSS asset.
There is an alternate to this approach, which would be to reapply styles with ActionScript code. However, this approach is more compact and has little to no impact on your actual component files. As a best practice for visual Xcelsius components, define your styles in CSS as opposed to inline to prevent the build up of redundant style specifications.
Evan DeLodder is a Senior Software Engineer focused on the development and application of cutting edge Rich Internet Application technologies in the Business Intelligence space. To learn more about him, please visit our new FleXcelsius page.
It is such a pleasure to be the first SAP Mentor to kick off this new “Dear aBI” series on the SCN Network. As a BusinessObjects reporting community evangelist, I was first humbled, but then excited about being asked to do this. I’m always amazed at how many questions we get from the community. The goal of this new column is to address the most common ‘important’ ones. While the answers are subjective, the opinions represented here are not only from experience, but also from a number of reliable sources both within and outside of SAP BusinessObjects. Kudos to Jason Cao and everyone involved in getting this kicked off! It goes to show, once again the commitment that SAP BusinessObjects has to getting the correct information to their users. I encourage everyone to submit their questions, small or big and we will do our best to address them.
Mico Yuk is a 2010 SAP Mentor and the founder of the Xcelsius Guru Network and the Everything Xcelsius blog. To learn more about her, please visit our About Us page.
With the recent back and forth battle between HTML5 and Flash and their place in the future gaining even more extensive tech-media coverage, we’ve been keeping a close ear to the arguments and have attentively followed both sides of the story since our core products and supporting technology rely heavily on Flash and Flex.
As the marketing and PR battle rages on between Apple and Adobe, blanket statements are being tossed around regarding the viability of both HTML5 and Flash technologies as if they’re competitors. So far, this debate has only served as a disservice the community in general as the misinformation train continues to board people in high places who don’t completely understand the technologies and begin to make decisions for their organizations that are driven by the general influence of external, biased companies promoting their own product interests, as opposed to properly assessing project technology needs based on other factors that have more, real world substance.
Many people have voiced their opinions on this topic and it’s certainly not breaking news though we thought it beneficial to speak directly on the future viability of Flash and Flex for enterprise Rich Internet Applications, specifically in the Business Intelligence space.
Centigon Solutions will soon be announcing a FleXcelsius boot camp training opportunity for a limited number of participants, to take place at our San Diego location.
We wanted to reach out in advance to gather preferences on what you would like to learn and any particular SDK pain points that you would like to have addressed. Please leave comments on this post regarding a preferred agenda and please email me if you’re interested in attending.
Evan DeLodder is a Senior Software Engineer focused on the development and application of cutting edge Rich Internet Application technologies in the Business Intelligence space. To learn more about him, please visit our new FleXcelsius page.
We want to welcome the much anticipated release of Fix Pack 3.1 or FP3.1 as it is officially called! We were the first to announce its release on twitter yesterday and wanted to follow up with an official post. The Fix Pack must be applied to Xcelsius 2008 SP3 (version: 5.3.0.0). If you don’t already have it installed, please click here.
You can download FP3.1 by clicking here, but please be aware, that there are two different versions available to download:
The Xcelsius Present 2008 Fix Pack 3.1 for Xcelsius 2008 SP3 Present
The Xcelsius Enterprise 2008 Fix Pack 3.1 for both Xcelsius 2008 SP3 Engage and Enterprise
After the FP 3.1 is applied, the version number should change to version: 5.3.1.0
According to our trusted guys at SAP, the documentation will be available shortly. They were too anxious to release the Fix Pack and didn’t want to wait for the documentation to be ready. Hey, we’re not complaining, Thanks!! Since we will be first to know when the documentation is ready, You will be first to know as well. Stay Tuned!
I apologize to my Flexcelsius readers for the lack of posts recently. I have been in high delivery mode and I’m finally back down with some time to create some fun and useful add-ons.
My previous post regarding add-ons was based on a very simple column chart that I indicated we would be extending on in subsequent posts. As a long time Flex dashboard developer, I really missed a few things in watching people create Xcelsius dashboards that I considered to be foundational in dashboard charting. To start, namely:
Dynamic series colors: i.e. switching between series colors on-the-fly at runtime
Dynamic series types: i.e. switching between series types on-the-fly at runtime
If the video is too small in your browser click here to view.
Mike Alexander is the author of several books on advanced business analysis, including Crystal Xcelsius For Dummies. You can find Mike at www.datapigtechnologies.com, where he serves as principle contributor and shares free video tutorials with the Microsoft Office and Xcelsius communities.
Software as-a-service applications like Salesforce.com and Google Maps Premier enable organizations of all sizes to offload operational and infrastructure costs associated with on-premise software. Organizations that have made significant investments in on-premise business intelligence are now mashing up data from web-based solutions thanks to powerful APIs. In the last year, Salesforce.com and Google Maps integrations for Xcelsius have popped up making it easier than ever to integrate these technologies without any coding. Third party software solution providers like Centigon Solutions and Moss Solutions are bridging the gaps between these powerful web-based platforms and Xcelsius.
For Salesforce.com users, you now have the perfect solution to easily load and analyze data within Xcelsius dashboards. Last year, I was introduced to David Moss of Moss Solutions, who developed the Force.com Integration for Xcelsius. As a technologist I was obviously interested to see how he designed the solution, but as a Salesforce.com customer I was even more excited to see how I could use the integration for my own business. The Force.com Integration for Xcelsius connects directly to Salesforce.com reports, even if your organization uses custom SFDC fields, objects, and report types. The integration leverages all of the filtering, summarization, layout, etc. defined within the Salesforce.com reports, making the integration extremely simple to implement and manage for the user of the component.
As an Xcelsius developer, you can use either a SFDC Connector within the Xcelsius data manager, or an interactive table component which provides inline drilling, grouping, ad-hoc filtering, and navigation of Salesforce.com report data. This tabular component is rich in functionality providing a simple way to drill through large volumes of data with extremely fast performance. A full list of features is available here at Moss Solutions.
Real-World ROI
David and I collaborated last year on a demonstration that I shared at the BusinessObjects user conference. The story behind the dashboard is a real customer use case to understand campaign effectiveness. Our customer’s campaigns invited targeted members to attend one in a series of local trade shows across the US. With lead information and conversion data captured at the tradeshows, the customer wanted to visually analyze who attended the trade show and to what extent the lead interacted with our customer. With a simple Salesforce.com report we could easily view the regional campaigns and view the leads. The report resulted in pages of data, which provided no insight to performance.
As a first time user of the Force.com Integration for Xcelsius, I was drilling through lead data from each campaign down to its campaign members within no time, but still desired a way to visually digest all of the valuable data. I next added the GMaps Plugin for Xcelsius to the dashboard, and setup the Force.com grid component so that drills and selections on the Salesforce.com data would be output to the Xcelsius model, and drive changes within the map. This allowed all of the leads and campaigns to be shown on the map, with the leads color-coded based on their status. The resulting spatial analysis provided tremendous insight based on lead proximity from the campaigns. From this analysis, the customer can not only measure the relative success of the campaigns that have already taken place, but can also quickly assess other locations for future campaigns. (See .swf below)
Using out of the box Xcelsius functionality, we were able to plug in the campaign costs and dynamically calculate financial ratios related to ROI. Using some more advanced calculations we could actually calculate effectiveness of a campaign based on the lead’s proximity from the event. This is the real value that customers want to uncover from dashboard applications and we are on the right path to make this analysis much easier to create.
If you are a Salesforce.com customer who is seeking a way to extract valuable analysis outside of the web-based tools out there, I highly suggest you take a look at the Force.com Integration for Xcelsius from Moss Solutions. You may sign-up for a trial at http://david-moss.com/registration . Feel free to ping me with any questions about my experiences with the technology and how I am going to implement it within my own organization.
Ryan Goodman is the Founder of Centigon Solutions, an SAP® software solution partner that is strategically focused on developing add-on products for use with Xcelsius®. To learn more about him, please visit our new Gurus page
BusinessObjects’ release of Xcelsius 2008 SP3 is a great step forward for customers to benefit from new charting, performance enhancements, and other capabilities that make dashboard development easier. For fellow Xcelsius customers and developers who have been patiently waiting for new functionality, this release is the one we have been waiting for.
Here are my top 10 features to help you jumpstart your exploration of new Xcelsius SP3 enhancements:
Performance
With a commitment to improve performance, there is a new option to optimize Excel performance in addition to promises of improvements to other previous performance concerns both inside of the Xcelsius design environment and runtime SWF files.
Bullet charts
A Steven Few inspired component set, the Bullet chart provides a new visualization tool for Xcelsius developers who want to maximize screen real estate while communicating more data.
Sparklines
Sparklines are the second new charting edition to Xcelsius that also provide significant value for organizations who want to leverage the popular data visualization control within Xcelsius. Previously only attained with add-on components, this functionality comes packaged with Xcelsius.
Selector Enhancements
In Xcelsius, staging data for visualization has long contributed to the learning curve required for building excellent dashboards. As a step forward to make selector configuration easier, the Xcelsius team has exposed new global properties for selectors. Hopefully this is only the first step to seeing significant improvements to selectors since this is the most powerful yet difficult concept to learn in Xcelsius.
No selection- Sometimes a developer does not want a selector to trigger until it is clicked on. While this request is simple in concept, this functionality was not available until now. For the casual Xcelsius developer this is not a major feature until it becomes a requirement, but those fellow developers who have experienced this limitation will appreciate this feature.
Multi-selection- Another developer-centric feature, multi-selection capabilities will enable a dashboard to trigger multiple events which was previously accomplished with workarounds (Excel logic and hidden selectors). The first time you open a standard selector, developers will noticed a revised property sheet UI that is extremely easy to pick up using previous Xcelsius experience.
Chart Enhancements
Sorting- The chart sorting requirements traditionally fulfilled with Excel logic or add-on components are now fulfilled for charts using a new sort behavior. Accessible in the chart behavior tab during design time, this functionality is extremely valuable when data is not loaded into a dashboard pre-sorted.
Labeling- As one of the most commonly requested features for Xcelsius, visible chart labels is now available simply by checking a box in the chart appearance tab under labels. Enable value and series label functionality and format them according to your design specifications.
Chart slider
To fill in IMT time slider capabilities previously available in BusinessObjects performance manager, developers can extend flexibility for end users to focus on a specific range within a time series using a dual slider. Built directly into the Xcelsius chart components, you can easily enable this functionality in the behavior tab.
Bindable Colors
As one of my personal favorites, you can now bind any color to the spreadsheet using a simple color binding option.
Scorecard
For any existing Xcelsius developers who have struggled aligning icons or hidden selectors, a real scorecard component will be a breath of fresh air, making it a relatively simple process for configuring alert indicators within a vertical table. I can instantly see a lot of opportunities to expand on this component, so I am interested to hear the community use cases for this new component.
Canvas Container Component
This is a nice component for new Xcelsius developers who want to group components without learning dynamic visibility. This component is available with the other container components.
New Gauge properties
Gauges have long been criticized for consuming a large volume of screen real estate without displaying enough information within the control. For customers who insist on using these controls, Xcelsius offers additional capabilities previously available in BusinessObjects performance manager. Bind multiple values to a single gauge and track them as marker indicators or additional needles. From the second you open the gauge property sheet, you can easily take advantage of these new features using the same paradigm you have always used.
Ryan Goodman is the Founder of Centigon Solutions, an SAP® software solution partner that is strategically focused on developing add-on products for use with Xcelsius®. To learn more about him, please visit our new Gurus page
Interested in hiring one of our Gurus? Need help training your staff? Not sure where to start building your dashboard? We can help. Contact us to find out more!
by Michael Alexander 
Interested in hiring one of our Gurus? Need help training your staff? Not sure where to start building your dashboard? We can help. Contact us to find out more!
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