Visual BI Extensions - Drill Down Charts

[IngoH]

One very common questions from customers is around the ability to drill down in charts in SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio and as probably most of you are aware, standard SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio is not delivering any drill down capabilities in charts.

As part of our Extensions for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio we provide the ability to do a real drill down as well as a inplace expand and collapse and we do support this for standard dimensions as well as hierarchies.

So lets assume we have two different sets of data. In the first data set we are going to use a set of multiple dimensions....

... and in the second data set we are using a hierarchy from BW.

Now we are adding a column chart with drill down capabilities from the Extensions to our dashboard and we are assigning these two data sources to the two charts. We do not have to do any scripting for the drill down capabilities.

In the Additional Properties of the two charts we can now configure the details of the behaviour.

Here we can set the properties on how the drill down / expand is supposed to happen and how the parent is going to behave.

• We can include or exclude the Root Level nodes of the hierarchy
• We can decide to show the parent nodes on a drill down chart so that we always keep the parent node.
• We can decide if we only would like to see the measure that was selected or if we would like to see all measures in a drill down.
• We can activate the hierarchical labeling - will show an example below
• We can limit the number of levels of the hierarchy
• We can configure if the parent node is going to be displayed before or after the children in the hierarchy.
• We can configure the events and what should happen on a click, double-click, and CTRL+click.

So lets start with the first data set and a simple column chart that allows us to do a drill down in SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio.

So the initial screen of the chart will look like shown below...

... and with a simple click on "Cameras" we can do an "Expand" on Product Group Cameras and we can then see the next level of details directly in the chart as an inplace Expand - as shown below

In the second example we will use the data set with the hierarchy and we will enable the hierarchical labelling as well. As shown below, the initial screen shows the two hierarchy nodes for Asia Pacific and Europe.

With a simple click on Asia Pacific we can use the inplace Expand and and expand the hierarchy node for Asia Pacific to the next level in the hierarchy.

In addition we can see the hierarchical labelling now in the X-Axis.

In case you do require charts with drill down capabilities, you will notice that such capabilities are not part of the core Design Studio offering, but the functionality can be achieve using Partner Extensions.

100 Things you can do with Visual BI Extensions and SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio