Design Studio 1.6 Feature Sneak Preview - CSV Data Sources and Exploration Template

[david_stocker]

There is a demo app, built my colleagues on the Design Studio PM team, christina.mast and Bettina Denonville, that we've been showing to customers lately.  I'd like to share it with the community for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, it demonstrates the kind of things that Design Studio is capable of, in the hands of a skilled designer, when extensions are brought into the mix.  The application in question uses a couple of components from the Design Studio SDK Development Community.  Specifically, it uses the Facet Filter Component and the Date Range Slider, to build a data exploration app.  The user interface is dynamic, allowing the user to toggle between chart, crosstab and chart/crosstab combo display, while expanding and collapsing the chart picker and navigation page as desired.  With the data range slider, the user can, with the flick of a mouse or a finger, set the desired data range.  With the facet filter, the user can perform guided data exploration in the style of Lumira or Explorer, but in a custom application.

But that's not the real reason for this post.  If you download app and look at it in the designer, you notice that it carries its own data with it.  This is the first sneak preview of Design Studio 1.6's CSV data provider.  This is a useful data source to use, if there are only small amounts of data and it is static.

Prerequisites:

• Design Studio 1.5 SP1.  (this version can consume existing CSV data sources, but the UI machinery to create new data sources will be available in 1.6)

• The Design Studio SDK Community Extension pack needs to be installed.  The easiest way to do this is to select Tools -> Install Extension to Design Studio... and enter the URL for the Community SDK extension pack's installer URL.

Installation:

• Clone the project from Github, or download it as a ZIP and extract it.

• Copy the contents of the zip (the .csv files and the BIAPP) to the root of the Design Studio repository.  The CSV files should reside in ..\Analysis-workspace\com.sap.ip.bi.zen\repository and not in the app directory itself as in the picture below.  (I have 6 .csv files, as this is not the only app I have that uses CSV data sources.  The data exploration app uses 4).

Import/Export does not yet work with CSV data sources, so you have to install it the old fashoned way.