Exporting with Lumira Designer 2.0

Lumira 2.0 has already been released by SAP since summer 2017. It consists of SAP Lumira Designer (formerly known as Design Studio) and SAP Lumira Discovery (formerly known as Lumira).

Now that already several of our customers productively switched to the new version, it is overdue to have a detailed look at Lumira Desinger and the compatability with our biExport solution.

Good news first: Of course, biExport also runs without problems also in Lumira Designer and Lumira Discovery!

What’s new despite the name change?

Despite the name change and technically joining of both frontends on one platform, from a feature point of view the new release is more an evolution than a revolution. Nevertheless an evolution that brings several advantages for the creator of reporting applications.

If you look at Lumira Designer / Design Studio, there have been three central new features, the possibilities to:

• group and preconfigure components as so called “composites” which speeds up implementation time
• define flex layouts, which finally allows you to create ONE application for BOTH desktop web clients AND mobiles
• use Lumira Discovery for prototyping a dashboard and to finish the design in Lumira Designer (reffered to as "interoperability") 

Also, SAP enhanced the PDF export and brought some new features in, which you already knew from our biExport 4 Design Studio extension for several years… 😊

(Why) is an export extension still important?

The answer is quite simple: YES!

And it can be explained with the following three scenarios:

1. Users usually do not only want to export to PDF but even more to PowerPoint or Word
2. A classic “one-pager” PDF does not always meet the requirements. Instead, users want define export-specific layouts, which rearrange certain objects. Also, highly customizable headers and footers, a title page or table of contents might be needed.
3. Users most of the times do not only want to export what they currently see. But rather all tabs or pages of an application, different filter sets or even contents of multiple applications at the same time.

And the coolest thing: Our biExport extension 4 Lumira Designer & Design Studio supports all these scenarios and so much more!

The extension does not only support the export formats PDF, PowerPoint, Word and Excel.

It also allows you to use a Word document or PowerPoint presentation as a template for PDF export. You simply create a document with title pages, table of contents and all these layout elements that you know from Microsoft Office. Then you add placeholders and specify it in the “Template” parameter for PDF export. As a consequence, the biExport extension executes a Word export but saves the document in PDF format. The user receives a beautiful document, which was implemented in practically no time!

The following video shows this feature for Lumira Discovery. As biExport is a generic platform, the export works exactly the same way for Lumira Designer:
 

Also, biExport offers a generic framework for exporting multi views at the same time. You can freely configure this feature to iterate over a tab strip, a page book, values of a filter dropdown box, values of a dimension, or multiple applications. A lot of our customers even combine these iterations to create really complex briefing books and monthly management presentations!

See examples of this feature in the following videos:

You can also check another post for a simple example of how to configure the feature:
Complex briefing books, booklets, management presentations easily created from sap design studio

Download and try it out yourself now! Simply register on this page!