Critical Xcelsius Tip for Connectivity

Posted on October 31, 2010 by

I have a very important tip for developers using any connectivity for Xcelsius.

DO NOT use the “Disable mouse input on Load” property. I have been using Xcelsius for 7 years and it has always come back to bite me in projects where needless hours were wasted troubleshooting. It bit me once again prompting this post and I hope to save everyone the same trouble by ingraining into your development knowledge to avoid this property.

What does this property do: Disable mouse input on Load iswill prohibit you end user from clicking on components while data is loading. One thing we have found working with lots of add-on components is that this feature and the SDK do not play nice together. I have also found scenarios even without add-ons the following symptoms:

1. After clicking inside of a dashboard and triggering live office, nothing in the dashboard is selectable.
2. Queries will seem to hang indefinitely, not returning data.

If you experience either of these problems, check to make sure this property is not enabled.

I would say report it as a bug to BOBJ which is a good idea, but for now, I live without this feature.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Connectivity, Trouble Shooting, Xcelsius | 22 Comments

Xcelsius Manual Reset Workaround

Posted on October 30, 2010 by

In 2007, I wrote an article outlining how to reset a dashboard using a selector: View original article. Since then, there have been some changes to Xcelsius where I wanted to re-visit this workaround.

Xcelsius does have a reset button built into the product, but it presents some challenges:

  1. It attempts to reset every component back to its original state which is not always the desired behavior.
  2. The standard Xcelsius reset button is incompatible with add-on components which is obviously can be a big problem.

Instead of using reset, you have a few options at your disposal, that essentially do the same thing. Upon clicking “reset” the selectors will clear out your selections.

  1. Use the push button component as a reset button to move a blank range into a destination.
  2. Use a hidden selector component to move multiple blank ranges into multiple destinations.

This re-set feature does present a few challenges, specifically when it comes to features like chart drill down. This is still going to be a challenge because there is not a bindable “selected item” property on the behavior tab.

Download Source Files

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Creative Workarounds, Xcelsius | 2 Comments

Create a Live Twitter Feed Ticker in Xcelsius

Posted on October 22, 2010 by

In this week’s Reportapalooza challenge, I saw a cool feature in Mico’s Ronald McDonald House dashboard.

Twitter ticker

On the bottom of her dashboard, Mico hooked up a twitter feed to a Ticker component, which is an awesome use case for this component. I found the RSS link on my Twitter page to transform my Twitter page into an RSS feed and was up and running in minutes. Here is how you can do the same for your Xcelsius marketing and demo dashboards.

Download Source Files | View GMaps Plugin Twitter Feed

  1. Go to any twitter page and on the bottom right pane, click on RSS Feed….
    Twitter URL
  2. Copy the URL which looks something like this: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166445794.rss
  3. Open up Xcelsius where we will first use XML maps to load our RSS feed
  4. Assuming you are using Excel 2007, open up the Developer tab. If you don’t see the “Developer” tab in your Excel, you need to enable it. Instructions
  5. Click on “Source” button in the Developer Tab
  6. Click on the XML Maps Button
  7. When the XML maps dialogue appears, click “Add”
  8. Now you will paste your RSS feed URL right into the “File Name” text box and press OK.
    NOTE: DO NOT USE “https://” in your address. Instead, use ‘http://” so the URL should look something like this http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166445794.rss
  9. Excel will connect to the RSS feed and then prompt you to inform you that it will create a generic schema.
  10. Click OK
  11. Now on the XML maps window, you will see all of the feed nodes.
    Twitter URL
  12. Select the “Title” and “Link” nodes and drag them into contiguous cells.
  13. Right click on the titles, hover over “XML” and then click refresh. Now you should see a data sample of the latest twitter posts.
  14. Go to the data manager and add XML Maps.
    NOTE: If you decide to change your twitter feed, you do not need to re-do steps 5-14.. Instead you can simply change the URL from the XML maps data connection. If however you make any changes to your XML maps inside of Excel, you will need to delete the XML maps connection in the Xcelsius data manager and re-add it for the changes to take effect.
  15. If you are going to publish your SWF to a server, you have to use a proxy because the Twitter crossdomain file does not allow Flash requests from other servers. The crossdomain headache is quickly bypassed using a PHP proxy that I have included with the source files. Instead of hitting the twitter URL directly the URL in the XML Maps data connection will look something like this: http://yourserver/crossdomain-proxy.php?url=http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166445794.rss
  16. In the Xcelsius data manager, you can set your feed to refresh. I recommend every 5 minutes or so.
  17. Insert the ticker component from the selectors component library.
  18. Bind the labels to your column with the title.
  19. Setup “Rows” insertion
  20. Select the source data property and bind it to the column with your twitter links.
  21. Set the destination cell where your URL will be insert.
  22. Insert a URL button from the Web Connectivity folder.
  23. Bind the URL to the same destination cell where your URL goes. Don’t worry about the URL title because we are going to hide it.
  24. Go to the URL Behavior tab and set the trigger cell to the same cell as the URL and set it to trigger on change.
  25. Now when you click on the ticker it will open into a new web page with the twitter post.

Make sure you vote for your favorite Reportapalooza dashboard!

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Connectivity, Integration, Xcelsius | 1 Comment

My 2010 ASUG SAP BusinessObjects Experience

Posted on October 11, 2010 by

In a post BusinessObjects hosted user conference, this is by far the best one since SAP acquired BusinessObjects. I was fortunate to see many of my friends, colleagues, customers, and partners over the last few days and though three days is long enough for the conference, there never seemed to be enough time to meet with everyone…

Presentation
On my first day, I had a primetime speaking slot where I presented “Xcelsius + GMaps – Coding + 15min = Must See”. My formula title backfired as they mis-printed it in the agenda but the turnout was amazing. I demoed GMaps Plugin 2.1 for the first time and took the time to explain why maps are so important to business intelligence and justified how Google Maps is the right tool for the job. All of the feedback was very positive and I hope to give this presentation again shortly. If you want to see some of the demos and GMaps 2.1 functionality, I have a webinar scheduled this Wed. at 10:00 am PST. Click here for more details

Xcelsius Gurus Party Sponsored by SAP
The highlight of the conference for me was the party, which was a little over-crowded but extremely valuable for networking. More so than ever, I spoke with existing SAP customers who have started using BusinessObjects tools like Xcelsius. Learning some of the customer pains and needs was very insightful and I am very interested to hear from the newer Xcelsius developers who pick up the technology and start learning through the community.

ASUG
Over the weekend I was fortunate to meet some of the ASUG leadership and I must say that I now understand where this recent post, “How ASUG Won me Over , came from . These guys are passionate about engaging the BusinessObjects community and I think they are onto something. I look forward to working closer with ASUG and the events they hold into 2011.

My Problem
The biggest problem I had was making all of my colleagues and friend’s sessions though I did see some very cool stuff with the new BOBJ 4.0 release and other vendor solutions that I look forward to sharing here on my blog.

I look forward to next year’s conference where we will absolutely be a sponsor so I can plant myself in one place if anything to ensure I catch as many people as possible face to face.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Xcelsius | Leave a Comment

Build vs Buy Discussion

Posted on October 6, 2010 by

Today at the BusinessObjects conference, I had an interesting discussion with a developer who liked our GMaps Plugin technology, but claimed that it was cheaper, and better to build his own Google Maps integration.

Build vs Buy should always be a consideration when you evaluate the cost of procuring technology vs funding the development yourself. However, the first rule is: “nothing is free” when you are using it for profit. In the Google Maps case, I explained that even if he could construct his Google Map experience within a day or two, he would hit two major roadblocks:

Licensing: Google Maps is NOT free for enterprise use. In other words, if you deploy Google Maps behind your corporate firewall, you are required to have Google Maps Premier annual licence. Centigon Solutions has negotiated and bundled the annual Google Maps service and discounted it within GMaps Plugin Bundle which is significantly cheaper than the entry level Google Maps Premier. I had explained to this developer that even if his time was worth $0, his organization would still pay more than double to Google, just for the annual service with nothing to show. GMaps Plugin bundle is an end to end solution which includes the developer tool and the annual service so just on this single roadblock, I was done making my case.

Integration: The most experienced Adobe Flex developer will still initially struggle through the mine field that is the Xcelsius SDK. Evan DeLodder has done a great job to help document some best practices and techniques on the Flexcelsius blog and his recent book, Creating Dashboards with Xcelsius. Without the flexibility to modify and configure the map inside Xcelsius, this developer would have to modify the source code every time the map needs to change. I can see a scenario where this has its benefits to gain complete control, but the cost of that control is significantly more expensive, especially if that developer leaves the company.

With the recent release of version GMaps Plugin 2.1 we have re-engineered how we render markers to squeeze every bit of performance out of Google Maps Flash API which was the result of hundreds of hours in development and testing. I think sometimes developers can under estimate the real time required to properly architect and deliver a solution vs “make it work”.

It was a good exercise to hear this point view, and I am hoping that it results in this consultant relaying the information to his organization and not going down a route that will ultimately cost a lot of money and cause a big headache!..Let me know what you think…

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Other | 2 Comments

GMaps Plugin 2.1 is Available

Posted on October 5, 2010 by

Today, Centigon Solutions made available the latest version of GMaps Plugin for Xcelsius, SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards. Learn More

Don’t let the “2.1″ version number itself fool you because this new iteration of our dashboard mapping solution is a more substantial jump forward in performance and new features than 2.0 was from 1.0. The two major themes of this release was performance and tighter integration with Xcelsius. The results are profound with up to 20x map performance thanks to a brand new marker architecture. As an Xcelsius developer myself, I am finally able to create the exact user experiences I have been urging for now that I get enhanced bi-directional communication with other Xcelsius functionality.

If you had taken a look at GMaps Plugin in the past and put it down due to any integration or performance concerns, it is absolutely worth picking back up. You can get a full rundown of the enhancements here: Whats new in 2.1?

Click here to download a trial

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Dashboards, Xcelsius Add-Ons | 3 Comments

ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference

Posted on October 2, 2010 by

Another year has passed and it is time to get together with all of my colleagues, customers and partners so we can share and learn from each other and experts. The BusinessObjects User Conference is by far may favorite event because each year I get to present what I have been working on to an audience who can benifit from the lessons learned and technologies that my team have developed.

This year I have a prime-time slot on the first day at 10:30 am titled:
Xcelsius + Google Maps + 15 Minutes – Coding = Must See

There, I will discuss how maps are no longer just a cool “mashup” but rather an important element to assess performance. There, I will feature the latest version of GMaps Plugin 2.1, which will be available for download for on Monday.

For those of you who will be there, please don’t hesitate to request one-on-one time. That is how I would prefer to spend the conference when I am not in sessions. If you can not make it, you can check out updates all week at: http://centigonsolutions.com/asug2010

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Other | 5 Comments

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