Antivia XWIS Advantage Express is an add-on by Antivia that lets us connect to Web Intelligence documents, Crystal Reports, and even SQL databases and OLAP cubes. Also, it comes with a large set of components to display and analyze the retrieved data.
As we have seen in Chapter 8, Dashboard Data Connectivity, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards is already able to connect to a number of data sources. This recipe will show you some of the capabilities of Antivia XWIS Advantage Express and the advantages it has over the standard connection types.
Go to the Antivia website (http://www.antivia.com/xwis-advantage-express/) and download the free 50-name user license. This recipe won't discuss the server-side installations for the Antivia framework that are required to run Antivia XWIS Advantage Express.
- Open a new SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards file and add the Antivia Connect component to the canvas. This component controls the user authentication and generates a session token. In every Antivia XWIS data component that we are going to use, we need to bind this token.
- Set up the spreadsheet as shown in the following screenshot:
- Bind the five fields of the General tab of the properties pane to the corresponding cells in the spreadsheet.
- Fill in your Username and Password in the Design time connection section and click on Connect.
- Add an XWIS Table component to the canvas.
- First bind the Session Token field to cell B6.
- Select a dataset from the Dataset Picker.
- Now go to the Content tab. Here you can define the layout of the table. Drag the objects you want to show in the table from the Available Objects area to the Result Objects area. For this example, select Year, Category, Quantity sold, and Sales revenue.
- Preview the dashboard, click on the Connect button, and check out what you just configured.
- Click on a value in the Year column to drill down to quarterly data. You can sort a column by clicking on its label. Now leave the Preview mode.
- Add a Pie Chart and a Line Chart component to the canvas.
- Return to the Content tab of the XWIS Table component. Select the AutoWire sub-tab.
- Select both the Enable AutoWire and Manage layout options.
- Also select AutoWire for these charts only.
- Select the Bind option for both chart components and also select the Layout option for the Pie Chart component.
- Preview the dashboard to see what happens.
- As you can see, the XWIS Table component now has two little symbols in its upper right-hand side. If you click on the pie chart symbol, the table will be replaced with the Pie Chart component. Click on this symbol.
- Click on a slice of the pie chart to drill down.
In this recipe, we showed you only a few of the possibilities of Antivia XWIS Advantage Express. One thing should be clear already: setting up an interactive dashboard that is capable of displaying and drilling through a large set of data is made very easy with this add-on.
The Antivia Service URL, username, password, and session token need to be bound to the spreadsheet; the BI System can be selected or bound. When connecting to a SAP BusinessObjects environment, your username and password are your SAP BusinessObjects credentials.
The XWIS Table component enables us to analyze a very large set of data (30,000+ rows) from within a dashboard, without the need to configure multiple data connections with QaaWS or Live Office, set up the spreadsheet, and define the bindings to a component. This is a huge efficiency gain!
We demonstrated the AutoWire feature that makes dashboard development even easier and faster because it completely takes care of the binding of data to standard SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards chart components. If you still want to bind the data to the spreadsheet, Antivia XWIS Advantage Express also provides this feature.
Antivia XWIS Advantage Express comes with a large number of components, which we will discuss in this section.
The XWIS Slice and Dice component lets the dashboard user create their own report layout. The user can use drag-and-drop to configure the report from a set of available objects. The following screenshot shows the interface where the user gets to do this:
The XWIS Export component enables us to export data from the dashboard to MS Excel files, which is an extremely powerful option. The button gives us two options—exporting the complete dataset or exporting the data as shown in the components.
In all data-based Antivia XWIS components, alerts can be used to highlight cells when a certain condition is met. A nice feature here is that these alert definitions are stored in the Antivia XWIS repository, so they can be reused in other components or even in other dashboards.
The Antivia Timer component is the only component that can work independently and does not need a session token to run. It writes the current time to a cell at a defined interval. This component can be useful to trigger components with the Refresh on change option or in combination with Dynamic Visibility.
Note
Visit the Antivia XWIS Advantage website at http://www.antivia.com/xwis-advantage-express/ for a complete overview of all Antivia XWIS Advantage add-on features and to check out some demo videos.