The Hierarchical Table is a powerful component that was introduced in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 FP3. It allows users to connect to either a BEx query connection or an OLAP universe and take advantage of its hierarchical display and multi-selection capability.
Before the Hierarchical Table was introduced, there was no way to accomplish native hierarchical display and selection without significant workarounds.
Before you can take advantage of the Hierarchical Table component, you must have an OLAP universe or a BEx query connection available. In our example, we create a simple cube from the Adventureworks data warehouse, which is easily accessible from MSDN.
You can download the Adventureworks data warehouse available at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/105902.
To set up a simple cube, please follow the instructions available at http://www.accelebrate.com/library/tutorials/ssas-2008.
To set up an OLAP connection to the cube, please follow the instructions available at http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/Setting+up+OLAP+Microsoft+Analysis+Service+through+an+XMLA+connection+with+SSO.
Finally, you will have to set up an OLAP universe that connects to the OLAP connection. Instructions for this can be found at http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-22026.
For instructions on how to create a query from the Query Browser, please refer to the Using the Query Browser recipe in Chapter 8, Dashboard Data Connectivity.
As you can see, the Hierarchical Table selector is a very useful component because before this component was available, we were unable to perform any form of hierarchical analysis as well as simple multi-selection. The component achieves hierarchical capabilities by taking advantage of the OLAP cube engine.
Unfortunately, the Hierarchical Table selector is only available from cube sources and not a traditional data warehouse table, because it uses the OLAP cube engine to do the processing.
The hierarchical capability, in our opinion, is doable with data warehouse tables as other tools allow this. So hopefully, SAP will one day upgrade the Hierarchical Table selector so that it works with your traditional data warehouse universe based on tables.