Complex Briefing Books, Booklets & Management Presentations easily created from SAP Design Studio

Most customers contact us to simply export the current status of a Design Studio application to PDF, PowerPoint, Word or Excel. They love the quality of the export documents and the flexibility to customize the documents, which is offered by biExport for SAP Design Studio.

The most interesting scenarios though are the publishing scenarios, which you can implement with our export solution:

• When not only the content that the user currently sees on the screen is exported
• When the document is not returned directly to the user, but sent or stored by the export process

 

My last blog post “Generate individual Briefing Books & flexible Analysis Documentation” was about the possibility to manually pin individual report views to an export document.

 

Today we will see how we can automate this process. With our “iterative execution” feature, you can easily define the automatic generation of complex Briefing Books or Management Presentations, which the user can trigger with just one click!

For these exports, you can select multiple Design Studio applications and you can define parameters to be passed to the applications. You can even activate the “iterative execution”, so the values defined for a parameter will not be passed at once, but in subsequent calls.

 

Imagine the following scenarios:

1. Export multiple filter selections at once into one document:

   Let’s say you want to provide different views in one document. For example, the overview on page 1, and the same information detailed to the four sales regions North, West, East and South on the following pages.

2. Export all contents of a dashboard, all tabs and / or invisible components:

   When complex dashboards are created, they for sure contain one or even nested tab strips, page books, or components which can be toggled visible or invisible. While these are all nice ways of organizing a complex dashboard for online usage, it is usually hard to export them. –Well, not with iterative execution!

3. Export several dashboards at once into one document:

   Imagine a business request to create a Management Presentation or a Briefing Book which contains data from several dashboards, e.g. the Sales, Financial and Production dashboards you created. With iterative execution you can easily select all three dashboards to be used during the export!

 

Here is how to implement these scenarios. We take scenario 1 for this example:

1. Start with your current dashboard

    

2. Add our Export component

    

3. Define an URL parameter, e.g. XTEST, in your application

   

    

4. Add a Design Studio script to fill the parameter value into the filter of your Sales Region dimension.

   

    

5. Fill property “Alternative Export Application” with the application’s CUID.

   

6. Add an entry to property “Url Parameter Array” as follows:

Applications	Parameter	Iterative	Values
	XTEST	True	;NORTH;SOUTH;EAST;WEST

 

And <ou are already done! Execute the dashboard and hit the export button!

 

Here is how simply users can easily use this feature:

They just click your export button!

This will force the Export to call the Alternative Export Application 5 times iteratively. Each time the URL parameter XREGION is set with one of the passed values: empty, NORTH, SOUTH, EAST and WEST.

Of course they are plenty of more scenarios, in which you could use this function!