During his keynote at D-code, an SAP internal developer conference, in Bangalore, michael.reh, EVP of SAP’s Business Information and Technology unit, announced the local 'Visualize Your Success - the Lumira Extension Challenge'! All SAP employees in India were invited to participate and the winning criterion was set to: "No Boundaries". The guideline was to build a Lumira extension with VizPacker and to use the extension to narrate a story depicting a powerful use case. Exciting prizes were up for grabs too, including tickets to Sapphire (Orlando).
To start with, several useful resources were provided - Lumira download link, D3 Gallery & Data Geek finalists, matt.lloyd matt.lloyd/content?filterID=contentstatus[published]~objecttype~objecttype[blogpost], and of-course the very useful Lumira documentation. The contestants had exactly five weeks to learn about Lumira, D3, create the extension and submit their visualizations. With just a little effort during the after-hours and weekends, over fifty visualizations were submitted and an internal panel of Lumira experts worked hard over a weekend to choose the winners.
And here's the story of the winning entry - Dynabars !
"Inception"
It has always been the ultimate dream to be able to travel in time. Being software developers for many years, shailesh.velaparambil and shiney.sooraj often wondered whether a software implementation of time travel would make sense and that is when the Lumira extension challenge came along. The two of us felt that we could bring this dream to life with a new exciting visualization of data growth.
While exploring the existing options in SAP Lumira as well as the open source world, we realized that almost all data visualizations have a common thread - they represent a static point in time. They show data as of today or any other day provided as input. We limit ourselves as soon as we choose a point in time because we only see aggregated data as of that day. We don't get to see how that data grew over time and so we miss some key insights. This led us to ask a simple question – “Can data tell us its story, can we travel through time with data?” This was the inception of “Dynabars”. They are dynamic bars that display the growth of data over time. Coupled with a Start/Pause/Resume button Dynabars is as thrilling and insightful as a movie that tells us the story of data. :cool:
SAP Lumira - "The Whole Nine Yards"
SAP Lumira has been one of the main buzzwords in recent months. As with any powerful tool, it is the simplicity that its drives mass adoption. Lumira can be configured by anyone with any data source in a few minutes. And we found out that the hype was well justified when we started tinkering with it. Extending Lumira is almost as simple as using it. In the end, we felt it is nothing less than a magical wand in the magnificent world of data visualization.
To build a unique, creative visualization, not published anywhere along with the rather scary thought that we were unfamiliar to the details of how Lumira worked; sounded pretty hard. To add to it we had absolutely no D3 skills and we were completely new to Vizpacker, the tool provided to build a Lumira extension. At the outset it seemed like a recipe for disaster - This challenge was definitely a “Challenge” :smile:
But as we took our first steps into the challenge we were pleasantly surprised. The sample videos on how to create a Lumira extension using Vizpacker completely drove away all our anxiety, what seems to be a big hurdle, now seemed like cake walk. With our confidence levels rising we went through all the learning resources on SAP Lumira. We were pleasantly surprised by the number of visualizations supported, varied data sources and the simplicity of the product. Being able to participate and create an extension for Lumira would definitely be a matter of pride.
And so we moved from very uncertain participants at an amazing speed to Lumira-aware, Vizpacker-proficient, excited participants armed with all resources to crack the challenge and the buoyancy to do wonders .
The Story of the Storyteller
And here is how we built Dynabars:
That’s our story of how, in nearly a blink of an eye, we created an extension on the ever so fascinating SAP Lumira. The easy of learning D3, the power and simplicity of VizPacker definitely enables Lumira to move from excellent to unparalleled – that’s our say!
Features of Dynabars
A peek into the future
We believe that Dynabars will pioneer a series of dynamic charts in SAP Lumira for time series data. The concept of time lapsing aggregated data can be extended to pie-charts, donuts and all other existing visualizations. The potential use cases are limited only by your imagination. It is a concept that can easily be integrated with existing SAP Lumira controls.
Until next TIME,
Shiney Sooraj and Shailesh Velaparambil.
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