Embed horizontal bar charts in a spreadsheet table component

One of the important features that SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards lacks right now is to be able to embed charts in a table. This is a very powerful feature as we are able to present a lot of meaningful information with little real estate when embedding charts inside a table as shown below. In Xcelsius SP3, SAP took the first step in creating the scorecard component which allows embeddable trending...

February 5th, 2015 by David Lai 

Using Xcelsius and Webservices to insert comments into a database

A common request that I have seen with my clients, is the ability to enter comments into a dashboard and then view those comments when they re-open the dashboard in the future. Unfortunately Xcelsius does not have a native mechanism to send data back to the database, as a dashboard’s main purpose to read data and not write back to the database.  However, I do see the value in being able to persist...

January 26th, 2012 by David Lai 

All you need to know about Open Document (opendoc) Part 2

I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately on how to setup opendocument (opendoc), so I’d like to post this tutorial on how to do so which works for Business Objects XI 3.1. Unfortunately my previous tutorial at http://davidlai101.com/blog/2008/11/04/all-you-need-to-know-about-opendoc/ only works with Business Objects XI R2 Please note that the tutorial was taken from SAP BusinessObjects...

September 29th, 2011 by David Lai 

Using Charles to help you debug!

In this article I would like to state the importance of how useful it is to use a traffic monitoring tool such as Charles or Fiddler when debugging connection type errors. In this example, we’ll go through a quick scenario on solving a crossdomain.xml related issue. You will need to Install Charles on your machine and install the Charles addon for Firefox. (more…)
March 18th, 2011 by David Lai 

Embedded Charts inside an Xcelsius Spreadsheet Table

One of the important features that Xcelsius lacks right now is to be able to embed charts in a table. This is a very powerful feature as we are able to present a lot of meaningful information with little real estate when embedding charts inside a table as shown. Embedded Bar Chart in Table (more…)
February 8th, 2011 by David Lai 

SAP Crystal Dashboard and Presentation Design (Xcelsius) Cookbook Coming Soon!

I hope that everyone has had a great start to 2011! 2010 was a huge year but 2011 looks to be even bigger! I’m very pleased to announce that the Xcelsius Cookbook, which Xavier Hacking and I have been working very hard on, is scheduled to be released in it’s final format on May 2011. The book will be structured like a cookbook where we will go through step by step on accomplishing different...

February 7th, 2011 by David Lai 

Trick to synchronize the hovering/selection of multiple scorecards

Recently for one of my clients, I had to figure out a way to synchronize the selection of multiple scorecard components. The tables needed to be separated but at the same time we needed to make sure that when hover over a row on one table, that the other tables would have the same row highlighted. The easiest way to accomplish this is to have a separator column to separate each table, and then overlay...

December 8th, 2010 by David Lai 

Xcelisius Dashboards outside of Infoview with the help of CELogonToken

Not all corporations want their employees to access dashboards through Infoview as some may want to access dashboards through a 3rd party website or portal such as Sharepoint. On top of that, users generally don’t want a login pop-up to appear whenever dashboard data is first refreshed. So we’ll need some sort of hidden login mechanism that bypasses the pop-up and allows data to be refreshed on...

November 18th, 2010 by David Lai 

Xcelsius Push Button

The Push Button is a powerful new feature in Xcelsius SP3 that allows developers to transfer source data from an arbitrary sized cell block to a destination cell block of the same size. This gives us a triggering type mechanism where we needed to jump through hoops in order to accomplish before. I’ve attached a video and the example xlf source file which shows how to use the push button as a...

May 29th, 2010 by David Lai