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 comments so that we can go back later and be able to look at documentation on why certain things happened, etc.

In this article I will give step by step instructions on how to use web services and Xcelsius to accomplish the task of inserting comments.  However you will have to write your own web service code

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

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 tasks (recipes) in Xcelsius.

In addition we will be showcasing some of the more popular 3rd party addons, provide best practices for development, as well as provide some real life dashboard examples built using recipes learned from the cookbook.

The book is currently available as RAW (Read as we write) format since it is currently under development, so feel free to check it out at the Packt Publishing website for more information.  In addition, since SAP is re-branding Xcelsius yet again, the book name will most likely change to SAP Business Objects Dashboards Cookbook.  Stay Tuned for updates!

Thanks for all your support!

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 a background or rectangle on the blank column. However the rectangle/background looks very ugly as what I have shown on the video.

Please watch the video for a detailed example on how to accomplish the synchronization trick with multiple scorecards.

I’ve also outlined the steps to accomplish this if you click on “More”

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 the dashboard.

Thanks to Ryan Goodman for de-mystifying the CELogonToken @ http://ryangoodman.net/blog/index.php/2008/01/21/xcelsius_single_sign_on_with_celogontoke
and thanks to William Sees for posting his code in the SDN network @ http://forums.sdn.sap.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1544768&tstart=30

In this article we will go step by step through the solution on how to retrieve a Business Objects Logon token and insert it into the CELogonToken Flash variable.