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Former Member

In this blog post, I would like to quickly share how easy it is to use SAP Business Objects Design Studio 1.0 to build up super analytical dashboards on HANA for both Desktop and the iPad by leveraging BI 4.0 SP5 and SBO Mobile 4.4.12.

If you are new to Design Studio, then check out this detailed overview from Tammy Powlas:

http://scn.sap.com/community/businessobjects-design-studio/blog/2012/12/08/sap-design-studio-for-das...

On the other hand, if you want to dive right in and get started, you can find official product tutorials for Design Studio by following this link:

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-30272

Here’s a quick overview of the topics I will cover:

  1. Identify your HANA Model
  2. Create HANA Connection in the CMC of your BOE
  3. Connect Design Studio to your BOE
  4. Create HANA Data Source in Design Studio and Edit Initial View
  5. Design your Dashboard and publish to your BOE
  6. Set up eveything for your iPad

Identify your HANA Model


For the HANA Model, I chose an Analytic View I created for a native iOS app we developed earlier this year.  Although it contains a lot of attributes views that will not be needed in my dashboard, we can still use this model as a data source and then edit the initial view later in Design Studio. Of course, you can also use Calculation Views since they contain key measures, as well.

Create HANA Connection in the CMC of your BOE


Normally, you might have to request the system administrator of your BOE to perform this task, but for purposes of this blog, I will show you anyhow. Log on to your CMC and click on OLAP Connections, then click on the “New Connection” button to bring up the connection dialog screen as seen below:

In the provider block, make sure you select SAP HANA as shown above.  Use the connection information either provided to you by system administrator or from your HANA Studio by bringin up the context menu for a connection, selecting the properties menu item, and clicking on Database User Logon, the Additional Properties tab. Use the information provided in the Host field as shown below:

Connect Design Studio to your BOE


Now it’s time for the fun part! Fire up Design Studio. If you are not prompted right away to connect to your BOE, then click on Tools->Preferences, click on Application Design, select „Connect to BI Platform“:

After you restart Design Studio, you should see the followin screen where can enter your server information in the following format:

http://<server>:<port>/dswsbobje/services/Session

Now you are connected and can take advantage of all the connections available on your BOE.

Create HANA Data Source in Design Studio and Edit Initial View


Go ahead and select the HANA Connection you created in step 2 above, then create a new data source based on your HANA Model from Step 1:

Your new HANA data source contains a single row with all your measures in the column section. You can change this by bringing up the context menu for a data source and selecting „Edit Initial View...“. Doing so will bring up the following screen, from which you can 1) , Add/Remove Measues 2) Add/Remove Dimensions, and 3) Add filters. Every change you make will be immediatly reflected in the Live Preview pane:

In the tutorial link I provided at the beginning of this blog, there are some great tutorials under the section „Working with Data Sources“ that describe this process in more detail. If you get a chance, take the time to go through that section to better understand some of the possibilities you have to set up your initial view.

Design your Dashboard and publish to your BOE


Now that you have your data sources set up, you can drag and drop the rest of your items like charts and dropdown boxes directly onto the canvas. Thereafter, you can assign your data source to your charts or crosstabs by either draging and dropping it directly onto a chart or by using the properties panel on the right side of your screen. In doing so, you will notice that the charts or crosstabs are immediately updated, which allows you to instantly see how your dashboard will look like in your browser.

Once you have finished, you can test your dashboard locally by hitting ctrl-f11 or the green play button in your menu bar at the top of your screen as seen below:

After you have tested everything locally, you are ready to publish your HANA Dashboard to your BOE. Since we are still connected to our BOE, all you need to do is go to Application->Save as...

This will bring up a dialog box that will allow you to save it to any one of your public folders on the server:

Now, you can share your newly created HANA Dashboard with other team members, so they can view it in their browser. However, we’re not done yet... We also want to view our newly created HANA Dashboard on our iPad.

Set up eveything for your iPad


The first step in bringing everything to the iPad is to add your newly created Dashboard to the Mobile Categories in the same way you would do for a Webi Report that you want to consume in the SBO Mobile App:

Now, we’re ready to configure everything on the iPad. If you haven’t done so already, update your SBO Mobile App to 4.4.12, which was just checked into iTunes on the 17th of December :smile:

As you can see from above, Support for Design Studio is brand spanking new. Anyhow, after you’ve updated your App, let’s start it up and create the connection:

After you have entered in the information provided by your system administrator, enter in your credentials and click on „done“.

You should see a thumbnail for your HANA Dashboard on the „Server“ page as shown below:

Finally, tap the thumbnail to run your newly created HANA Dashboard using SBO Design Studio.

I hope this was helpful for people who are thinking about the best way to create a highly interactive Dashboard on HANA for both the Desktop and the iPad by leveraging your BI 4.0 SP5, SBO Mobile 4.4.12 and of course doing it the SBO Design Studio way!

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