Hey BPX and SDN Folks!

We've launched the new CPM Forum for any questions the community may have for the new SAP CPM Suite! This includes SAP BPC (formerly Outlooksoft), SAP SSM (formerly Pilot), and Acorn (SAP's reseller agreement).

Additionally, people have been asking about some roadmap and detailed questions around what to post where. Therefore, to get the most visibility to your questions with the right groups at SAP, I would post questions to the following forums:

SAP Solution -> ERP Financials Forum
SAP ERP Financials

Use this forum for the following product lines:

• SAP Financial Components

Business Process Expert - Corporate Performance Management Forum - New SAP CPM components

NEW! - Enterprise Performance Management (SAP EPM)

Use this forum for the following products:

• SAP BPC (Outlooksoft)
• SAP SSM (Pilot)
• SAP BPM (Acorn)
• SEM Miscellaneous
• Balanced Scorecard
• Management Cockpit
• Value Driver Trees
• Roadmap, Etc...

SAP Solutions - SEM-BCS Forum - The SEM-BCS product line 

NEW! - Business Consolidation (SEM-BCS)

I've recently started working with these topics, and I plan on encouraging our developers from the Outlooksoft and Pilot acquisitions to actively monitor this forum. This product line and the expertise around these products are currently different from the SAP NetWeaver Business Planning and ERP Financials forums, so we wanted to make sure we can address these questions directly and share knowledge in this area. These companies had their own customer bases as well which can contribute to the wealth of knowledge on these software components and share their experience with SAP customers. Additionally, the old SEM-CPM (Balanced Scorecard/Management Cockpit) really never had a home on SDN, so I'd like to have those questions posted here as they are going to be tightly related to the roadmap questions between these SEM-CPM products and the newer SAP Strategy Management products.

Due to feedback from SDN community members about SEM-BCS not having a specific home a new forum has been created for BCS as well.

Lately, there has has been a lot of emails coming to my and my colleagues inbox around these new CPM topics, so therefore I thought a forum for this would be great.

Business Intelligence - Business Planning Forum
Business Planning

• BI-IP
• BW-BPS
• SEM-BPS

These topics refer to our current planning implementations of BI-IP and BPS. Any technical implementation questions about these topics should go in this forum as the experts in this area will be checking this forum.

I look forward to working with the SDN community. If you post to the forum, I use this as feedback for what we should put into the product, so if you have any comments or feedback, please post it on the new CPM forum!

h5. Introduction

Yahoo Widgets are great applications for allowing users to interact with systems or applications directly on their desktop. Within the SAP space, there are casual users of BI that may want metrics on a daily basis. Many customers run their businesses off one or two key reports, such as a daily sales report, or a simplified financial statement. Therefore, this guide provides a way to consume BI Data within Yahoo Widgets.

Screenshot of Widget Version 1.0:

Screenshot of Widget Version 2.02:

Screenshot of Widget Version 3.x (Coming Soon!!!):

!https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/weblogs/images/28269/widg3x.jpg|height=390|alt=image|width=578|src=https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/weblogs/images/28269/widg3x.jpg|border=0!"

Scenario

As with any solution, the first thing you need to do is identify when to use the solution. The Yahoo Widgets solution is great for targeting your casual user. For example, many users have similar types of desktop applications to view their stock ticker every morning. This information is peripheral. You glance at it in the morning, but don’t really do anything or follow up unless your stock value changes drastically (either positive or negative).

I’m proposing that key enterprise metrics be treated in a similar manner. For example, if a company uses daily sales numbers to measure performance, this metric should be pervasive within the organization. Users should see their metric peripherally every day when they log onto their machine, and should only follow up if they see unexpected numbers.

The Yahoo Widget Application allows you to present this to the user in a very nice way. They won’t even know they are interacting with an SAP application! h5. Version History and Limitations

Version 1.1:

• Does not support structures in both rows and columns

• Does not support structures and characteristics in both rows and columns

• Does not support hierarchies

• Does not support queries with mandatory variables

Version 1.2:

0.1. Added support for all query datasets with 2 structures and n characteristics

0.2. Added support for structures in both rows and columns

0.3. Added support for structures and characteristics in both rows and columns

0.4. Does not support hierarchies

0.5. Does not support queries with mandatory variables

Version 1.3:

0.1. Widget now refreshes when preferences are changed

Version 2.01:

0.1. Sap blue skin

0.2. Ability to select demo data set from preferences

0.3. Removed Change Background Color (not needed in blue skin)

Version 2.02:

0.1. Adjusted timer 

0.2. Added 5 min option

Version 2.04:

0.1. Added Logon Language Support

0.2. Added Support for 0CALDAY (ExtVal display)

Version 2.05:

0.1. Added Support for Hierarchies (no expand and collapse)

Version 2.06:

0.1. Added Expand/Collapse icons for Hierachies (not dynamic)

Version 2.07:

0.1. Added "no applicable data found" support

0.2. Fixed the last updated display to support real time cubes

0.3. User defined number for the refresh interval instead of pull down

0.4. Added >1 header row query support

0.5. Added color coding based on BI exceptions

0.6. Added customizable height

0.7. Added display of key if description is not available

0.8. Added traffic light support (you need to use IOBJ 0TCTRQCSTA)

0.9. Added text variable support (not dynamic i.e. fixed in widget code)

0.10. Added secure check box that removes copy of the XML on the C: drive if any

0.11. Removed password from PDF, Excel and query jumps (for security)

Version 2.08:

0.1. Added themes to prefrerence

0.2. Added report navigation buttons, but did not enable it

0.3. Added button and second window for query informtion, and partially enabled it, still need to source info

0.4. Added a distraction image, but did not enable it

Version 2.09:

0.1. Added theme preference

0.2. Changed group to CPM

0.3. added last refresh date to query properties

0.4. re-aligned buttons

Version 2.10:</p><ul><li>Changed the tooltip on the information button</li><li>Fixed the query description when "no applicable data found" so that if it ran once, the desc will remain</li><li>Set the default theme to blue (in the preferences section)</li><li>Adjusted technical name display in cells (ChavlExt first then Chavl)</li><li>Display SAP logo instead of update icon in docking</li><li>Added multi language support to QueryInfo splash screen</li><li>Added multi language support to "Last refreshed date" </li><li>Remove the <name> tag in widget.xml to allow multiple widgets to run </li></ul><p>Version 2.6:

0.1. Updated Version Number to 2.6 due to confusion on SDN

0.2. Added underlying framework for expand/collapse hierarchy (dynamic hierarchies)

   - This is not complete yet...

Version 2.70:

0.1. Updated the Expand/Collapse Hierarchy WebApi Commands to include dynamically building parameters

0.2. Added sample dataset for 1 char and 1 hier in rows

0.3. Hid the preferences for dynamic hierarchies as this isn't complete

Version 2.71:

0.1. Added Widget Version to the Info Screen

Version 2.73:

0.1. Ported the web service to call BAPI with dynamic webservice

0.2. Hierarchy icons were broken in this version

0.3. Added "View" Support

Version 2.74:

0.1. Updated Connectivity

0.2. Added eror handling

0.3. Hierarchy icons were broken in this version

*Version 2.75: </p><ul><li>Fixed Hierarchy Icons</li><li>Added more error handling</li><li>Added support for foreigh character sets (Japanese & the such)</li><li>Fixed Launching View URL to Web, PDF, and Excel</li></ul><p>Version 2.76:</p><ul><li>Upgraded to Yahoo Widget Engine 4.5</li><li>Bug in Deleting hierarchy icons when changing queries</li><li>Fixed bug in Preference Groups not showing up on subsequent executions</li></ul><p>Version 2.77:</p><ul><li>Fixed bug in Deleting hierarchy icons when changing queries</li></ul><p>Version 2.78:</p><ul><li>Enhanced Error Handling Framework to check if the RRW3_GET_QUERY_VIEW_DATA function is RFC enabled. It should be, but I added this check due to a rare customer issue where they did a core-mod</li><li>Published Widget in compressed format to reduce the size</li></ul><p>Version 2.79:</p><ul><li>Updated default widget width based on customer issue</li><li>Updated widget to handle secure mode even is SSO is not configured (using logon popup)</li><li>Updated initial widget view to hide scrollbar and info button until widget is rendered </li></ul><p>Version 2.80:</p><ul><li>Updated widget minumum column size for small datasets</li><li>Updated widget to include additional demo data</li></ul><p>_Latest Download (2.80) Available Here:

_*

Pre-requisites

The latest versions of the BI Data Widget do not require the queryviewdata web service to be activated as the earlier versions did.

Step 1

Go to SICF and activate this web service: “/sap/bc/soap/rfc” 

* </p><p>Step 2

Go to http://widgets.yahoo.com/download/  (http://widgets.yahoo.com/download/) and download and install the latest version of Yahoo’s Widget Engine. <br />!https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/weblogs/images/28269/ywidg1.jpg|height=396|alt=image|width=256|src=https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/weblogs/images/28269/ywidg1.jpg|border=0!</p><p>Optional:*

Here is an example of how to pass parameters for filter values using WEB API commands. We are passing the FILTER_IOBJNM=0D_CHANNEL and FILTER_VALUE=3.

 Here is an example of how to pass parameters for variable values using WEB API commands. In this case, we are using a selection option variable. We are passing the following parameters:

VAR_NAME_1=DISTGOP

VAR_OPERATOR_1=EQ

VAR_VALUE_LOW_EXT_1=3

VAR_VALUE_HIGH_EXT_1=5

!https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/weblogs/images/28269/qvw18.JPG|height=326|alt=image|width=594|src=https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/weblogs/images/28269/qvw18.JPG|border=0!</body>

This blog is replaced with a newer version located here:

BI Data Widget - Weblog Series & Pre-requisites

Introduction

The Scenario

The Options

• Use Value Help Wizard - By far, the easiest option is to use the value help wizard. This will generate a popup iView to choose your values as displayed below. To build this, just right click on a field in your form, and choose the value help wizard option.
  
  
• Use Table Element - In this case, you can use a multiselect table element instead of a form as input for your data service. In this example, I'm going to base it off a BI Query. To build this, you would follow these steps:
  1. Insert InfoObject Dataservice into your model.
  2. Connect output of infoobject dataservice to a table.
  3. Specify the selection mode of the table as "Multiple".
  4. Connect the output of the table to the input of your BI Query Dataservice.
  5. Map the output of the table field to the input of your BI Dataservice.
  6. Create an output table from your BI Query to display your results.
  
  See the example below for selecting distribution channels. You can hold down the CTRL key to select multiple values. You have the option to put this table in a layer or a popup for preserving screen real-estate if need be.
  
• Use BI elements - Visual Composer doesn't natively allow you to multiselect values in a dropdown within a form. To do this, you have to use another UI Elements. This how-to guide shows how to do it in VC: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/5a40f2f7-0c01-0010-d69f-c6317c5165cd. In this scenario, you can get an output such as displayed below:
  

Summary

h5. Introduction

Recently, I've had lots of people ask about how to segment the navigation pane or deal with lots of objects within the navigation pane? In this blog I describe options for working with the navigation pane in SAP NetWeaver 2004s BI. As per the GA Limitations located here: https://websmp208.sap-ag.de/~sapdownload/011000358700003437292006E/FunctEnhancSchedNW2004sB.ppt, there are planned improvements in SPS11 in this area, but this blog will discuss the options before these enhancements are available.

h5. Option 1 - Using the Tray Option

The first option is you can turn on the tray option within the Navigation Pane web item. This will create a tray icon to show or hide the navigation pane to buy you screen real estate. If you need to create 3 separate trays for collapse functionality, you can do this by creating a different navigation pane for each area (row, column, free characteristics). To put these objects next to each other, you can creae these separate navigation panes, but there is no way to filter to a more granular level than “row, column, or free characteristic”. Once this is done, they can be put side by side by using the "Container Layout" web item or by using html tables.

Collapsed (Side by Side):

Expanded (Side by Side):

The limitation of using this is you cannot embed the div tag within a “Container Layout” or “Container” web item. You must use html tables to control layout and formatting when using div scrolling.

h5. Summary

Hopefully these workarounds will help you work with navigation panes that have lots of characteristics and key figures.

Introduction

How do we compare?

What to be careful of?

Are there other functions in SAP NetWeaver 2004s BI?

Where do I find details and examples?

Summary

h5. Introduction

In this blog, I will show an example of the power of BI Commands within the BEx Web Application Designer in SAP NetWeaver 2004s BI. In this scenario, I demonstrate how you can show/hide a particular characteristic from displaying within your web application while keeping the data table as input ready for a planning enabled BEx Query! This will allow you flexibility in your presentation layer versus your integrated planning input layer.

h5. Here's an example view

The example application looks as follows:


*Figure 1 - Sample Application (default view)*

*Figure 2 - Sample Application (after clicking hide currency)*

*Figure 3 - Sample Application (after clicking show currency)*

As we see here, the query has Fiscal Year, Currency, and Version. These are all required to be in the rows to be at the lowest of the query for planning. Therefore, this solution shows how you can be at the lowest level, but hide the display of a particular characteristic from your table. If you utilize this method, keep in mind that the data will be written for this particular "hidden" characteristic value. In general, it is recommended that the characteristics you plan on are specified in the query and not directly in the web application to drive the most consistency. This solution just shows how to control the presentation layer.

h5. Implementation

To implement this solution is very straightforward. We are using the command "SET_PRESENTATION" within the Command Wizard in the BEx Web Application Designer. The values for this presentation can be found in the online help here: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw2004s/helpdata/en/43/d8c6dcc0700235e10000000a11466f/content.htm .

h5. What Next? - Toggle Buttons!

So now you're probably thinking, hey, he's got two buttons there. That takes up screen real estate. Why doesn't he make that a toggle button. You can do that as well! The online help has an example of toggle buttons here: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw2004s/helpdata/en/43/935812ff0b274ee10000000a422035/frameset.htm . Definitely worth checking out.

*Figure 4 - Web Template with Toggle Buttons (before click):*

*Figure 5 - Web Template with Toggle Buttons (after click):*