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
• Dynamic series addition and removal at runtime
• Dynamic series position at runtime
• Dynamic series alpha at runtime
• Dynamic HTML tooltips

Custom Xcelsius Combo Chart

These small but powerful features can significantly reduce the amount of objects needed to traditionally compensate for the absence of these abilities in the Xcelsius environment.

I wanted to create a simple yet powerful representation of these concepts that would show people that are new to Flex charting how exactly they may go about coding up quick charts to fill feature gaps and enhance their Xcelsius design-time productivity. I created a Line/Area/Column type combo chart that fulfills the requirements called out in the list above and have included the full source code, including a functional Xcelsius XLF model to serve as a functional example here:

The property sheet is really simple and if you look at the example XLF, you’ll see how the data needs to be structured for the series and the chart data.

A few notes regarding this chart’s functionality:

1. You can switch series types at runtime
2. You can add or remove series at runtime by blanking out a given series type cell value
3. You can add and remove data dynamically at runtime
4. You can change the order that series appear at runtime i.e. bringing to front or sending to back
5. You can set the chart’s font color through a color picker in the property sheet
6. Chart series are added in the order specified, so if you put an area series on last, it will render in front of the other series present on the chart, etc.
7. All of the chart’s functionality barring colors, is completely data driven
8. HTML tooltips only support basic tags and do not support images or other more advanced features…yet.
9. Data and tooltips share cells separated by a :  See XLF for an example
10. Please refer to the XLF on how to properly structure your data for this chart

In my next post, we will further extend this chart, adding in very useful features such as drilling down in-place, without any Xcelsius logic.

Best Regards,

Evan DeLodder

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• September 3, 2009 — Formatting, Visibility and Watermarks (0)
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We would like to officially announce that Michael Patton, of BMW Manufacturing, is the winner of the free seat to the Xcelsius Advanced Developer Workshop in Dallas, TX, on March 24-25. We apologize for the delay in announcing the winner, but we wanted to confirm that he would be able to attend.

For those of you who attended the webinar and received the discount code, we have decided to extend it out until 12AM PST, due to the delay on our behalf. For those of you who registered, but was not able to attend, you should have received an email with the discount code, if not, please send an email to soo@everythingxcelsius.com and I will send you the code directly.

There is less than 3 weeks left for the workshop on March 24-25 in Dallas, TX, and the seats are filling up fast. We encourage anyone interested in attending, to register today. If you are having trouble with reserving a room at the hotel or have any other questions please feel free to send me an email directly.

We hope to conduct another webinar soon and welcome any emails with topic suggestions.

Thanks,

Soo Tang Yuk
soo@everythingxcelsius.com

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• March 2, 2010 — FREE Advanced Xcelsius Tips and Tricks Webinar with giveaways! (4)
• February 9, 2010 — VIDEO: How to use Xcelsius 2008 with VBA! (5)

Below is the webinar agenda for your reference:

1. Introductions (Mico)
2. Data management Tricks (Mike)
   • Copying Formulas from Xcelsius to Excel
   • Dynamcially Resetting Controls to a Default
3. Visualization Tricks (Mike)
   • Creating Web Style Menus
   • Creating a Pin-Cushion Chart (Simulating Drop Lines in Xcelsius)
4. Discuss Upcoming Training in March (Mico)
5. Q&A (Mico)

This webinar is a preview to our Advanced Xcelsius Developer Workshop on March 24-25, 2010, in Dallas, TX. During the webinar we will be offering the following:

1. Free! Seat Giveaway
2. Discounted sign ups until 12am EST that day for $949/person instead of $1099/person
3. More info on what will be covered

For more information on the workshop on March 24-25, 2010, please visit http://xcelsiustraining.com

We only have 100 spaces available for this FREE webinar, so please reserve yours today! Click here to register!

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• March 9, 2010 — Thanks for a successful webinar! (0)
• February 9, 2010 — VIDEO: How to use Xcelsius 2008 with VBA! (5)

I  put together a video to show you how integrating Xcelsius into Excel and Access, enables you to:

• Utilize existing Microsoft Office solutions to extend the capabilities of Xcelsius.
• Utilize familiar Office environment as primary platform
• Take advantage of core Office features such as PivotTables
• Extend VBA to your Xcelsius models
• Simplify the data transfers to your Xceslius models

See video below or click here to see in browser.

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.

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• March 9, 2010 — Thanks for a successful webinar! (0)
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If you are anywhere online, you are probably starting to hear the buzz about the upcoming Xcelsius Advanced Developer Workshop, being held in Dallas, TX. I will be conducting the training along side, Mike Alexander, author of the popular book, Crystal Xcelsius for Dummies. Last year the training sold out early, so we encourage everyone to register early. Register before 2/15 and receive the early bird special $200 discount! This year, the training is filled with tons of surprises and prizes, along with breakfast and lunch with the us.

On the 1st day, the training will cover, Advanced Dashboarding Techniques. Mike and I will be giving techniques on how to design your Xcelsius dashboard. On the 2nd day we will cover Advanced Data Connectivity Techniques. For more information about the training agenda, please visit http://xcelsiustraining.com. You can also follow our FaceBook FanPage or the My Xcelsius Blog to see what others are buzzing about.

Remember, catch the early bird special by registering before 2/15. We look forward to seeing everyone there!!

Mico Yuk is the founder of the Xcelsius Guru Network and the Everything Xcelsius blog. To learn more about her, please visit our About Us page.

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Part II Video 1

Part II Video 2

Kalyan Verma is a BI consultant, freelance Xcelsius Developer and a Web Blogger. He is based out of Boston, MA and his technology interests range from BI to Visual Data Analysis. Visit our Gurus page for more info.

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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

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Apart from showing how to Download, Install and talking about the new components, I also quickly demonstrated how to use them. Beginners might find it a little hard to follow. Please note that this is just to introduce the components. We will be doing a series of Text and Video posts in the near future to demonstrate the full functionality of the new components.

Kalyan Verma is a BI consultant, freelance Xcelsius Developer and a Web Blogger. He is based out of Boston, MA and his technology interests range from BI to Visual Data Analysis. Visit our Gurus page for more info.

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Here are my top 10 features to help you jumpstart your exploration of new Xcelsius SP3 enhancements:

1. 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.
   

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.
   

7. Bindable Colors

   As one of my personal favorites, you can now bind any color to the spreadsheet using a simple color binding option.
   

8. 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.
   

9. 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.

10. 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.

    

Please download SP3 directly from SAP Software Download Site.

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

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We’ll start by setting up the Flex component, its charting data provider, a few basic styles, and a very basic custom property sheet integration. You can find all of the (xlx, xlp, Flex source) source code here…

We’re working with an MXML-based component to illustrate a rapid way to construct custom charts and also because I prefer markup to pure ActionScript coding for readability and ease of use. I also think that a lot of attendees learning about the SDK for the first time at the BOBJ conference in October looked rightfully frightened seeing pure AS components and 1000’s of lines of code for 1 simple component. Here, we’ve used <100 lines of code for our chart, mostly markup, and we have achieved an impressively rapid custom column chart as the result. Creating this entire project (chart, property sheet, Xcelsius Packager) took under an hour.

We’ll keep posting updated source code as this component evolves through the series, including in-line source code comments. Please note* Use the code however you’d like. However, it will be up to you to ensure its stability and is not recommended for a production environment, more as a jump start to inspire confidence and ideas for injecting easy and free custom charts into your Xcelsius projects.

To use the component in Xcelsius, bind the data property to a single row of data, as we only have 1 series at this stage. Then, select your fill type and you’re all set.

**I took the property sheet directly from the BOBJ SDK examples and quickly modified it to meet these requirements. Try it for yourself and see what else you can add on if you’d like.

**Also, remember to set up this project using the SDK fundamentals (i.e. setting the compiler to 2.0.1 HF3, referencing the Xcelsius SDK swc, etc.)

**If anyone has a custom chart they’d like to see, please feel free to comment.

Next, we’ll look at adding multiple series, custom tooltips, number formatting and some additional styling controls.

Other Posts to See

• June 30, 2009 — Video: Show Chart Values without Hovering (0)
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