Date Aggregation – The Key to Date Based Analytics

[AvinoamFraenkel]

One of several important tools that together make SAP Web Client Analytics compelling is the Date Aggregation feature.

The Date Aggregation feature transforms every single date field that appears on every List View screen across the system, into 8 separate fields that can be used for sorting, grouping, finding, filtering and charting data. This includes all date fields that appear on System, UDQ (User Defined Query), UDT (User Defined Table) and UDO (User Defined Object) based List Views. (For more details about List Views – see here.)

For every List View date field, apart from the date field itself, an additional 7 fields are made available in the List View screen. Here is an example of the 8 List View fields displayed together demonstrating the type of data that should be expected to be seen within each field for the example date field “Posting Date”:

The details of the additional 7 fields (as identified by their bracketed suffix above) are as follows: 

• Year
  • This field will allow sorting, filtering, and grouping aggregation of all transactions with the same year value.
• Quarter
  • This field will allow sorting, filtering, and grouping aggregation of all transactions with the same quarter value, irrespective of which year it belongs to.
• Month
  • This field will allow sorting, filtering, and grouping aggregation of all transactions with the same month value, irrespective of which year it belongs to.
• Week
  • This field will allow sorting, filtering, and grouping aggregation of all transactions with the same week value, irrespective of which year it belongs to.
• Year and Quarter
  • This field will separately sort, filter, and group by each combination of both Year and Quarter values. Grouping by this field will present a consecutive sequence of quarterly values, progressing sequentially for each year.
• Year and Month
  • This field will separately sort, filter, and group by each combination of both Year and Month values. Grouping by this field will present a consecutive sequence of monthly values, progressing sequentially for each year.
• Year and Week
  • This field will separately sort, filter, and group by each combination of both Year and Week values. Grouping by this field will present a consecutive sequence of weekly values, progressing sequentially for each year.

As each of these fields are populated with real data, they can be sorted, filtered, and grouped by that data. For example, if I am only interested in data related to the second quarter then I can simply set the filter “Q2” and all the records displayed will only be second quarter data. E.g.:

This doesn’t just apply to records in the Table View. The filter also applies to the chart and card views as well. In the following example the “Posting Date (Year)” field is used to aggregate data in the chart. However, in addition to this the “Posting Date (Quarter)” field is filtered for second quarter transactions only, i.e., “Q2”. The result is that we see the second quarter sales invoice totals for each year, as follows:

Just as this applies to the Chart View, it similarly applies to the Card view. Here is a card under construction where it can be plainly seen that the date aggregation fields are all available to be chosen as dimension fields. In this example 2 different sets of date aggregation fields are highlighted to demonstrate that every single date field generates an additional 7 date aggregation fields:

In addition to the List View screens, date aggregation functionality is also available in the General Overview screen. With the General Overview screen, as every card is based on a different List View, the date aggregation functionality works in the same ways as, e.g., in the above Card View screenshot of a regular List View. The only difference is that date aggregation fields can also be used for filtering on a card-by-card basis in contrast to the List View Card View, which only allows filtering on a global basis.

The date aggregation functionality becomes particularly powerful when used in conjunction with the date offset functionality (for details about the date offset functionality – see here).

Hopefully it should now be clear that the date aggregation functionality transforms every List View screen into a powerful date-driven and simple to use analytics tool.