Foreword

For the last decade, Xavier and David have authored several books and articles on SAP BusinessObjects products, including Design Studio and Dashboards. I have personally known Xavier for many years, and his approach to Business Intelligence, with practical advice and real, step-by-step development support, has been invaluable for thousands of developers and business people struggling to keep up with this rapidly changing technology.

Currently, there is no other guide that is more comprehensive than the cookbook you are now holding. It covers all the new capabilities within SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.1. I particularly like the way Xavier and David continue to write using recipes. This approach quickly allows you to find the functionality you need, and then get the step-by-step advice on how to do it. This is very unlike some other books on the market that only tell you what to do, but really do not show you how to do it.

In this updated and expanded edition, you will appreciate the new chapters on performance tuning and how to get maximum developer performance through shortcuts, tips, and tricks. You will also find an updated section on dashboards based on mobile and HTML and an introduction to Design Studio.

In addition to these new sections, you will still find in-depth information on all aspects of Dashboards 4.1, including spreadsheet customization options, the manipulation of worksheets and canvas components, and data visualization, including the numerous charts and associated components that can be implemented as extensions. By following the advice in this book, your dashboards can cease to be static presentations of data and take on a new form of interactivity, where you can save scenarios and interact with the data in ways not done before.

In this book, you will also find recommendations on key concepts that are taught in classes but are seldom used by beginner developers, including how to hide graphs and call them through dynamic visibility and how to tailor the look and feel of a dashboard using templates and standards.

You will also appreciate that all of the dashboard connectivity options are explained, including connections to Excel XML Maps, SAP HANA, Live Office, Query as a Web Service, SAP BW, ODBC, and others. David and Xavier also cover how to integrate third-party add-ons such as Google Maps and Salesforce.com. Any developer, whether a senior or beginner, will significantly benefit from this latest cookbook. Frankly, all my developers use the previous cookbook as a reference when they are stuck on certain tasks, and I, personally, have been using the cookbook in my lectures at the SAP University Alliance over the last few years. It is with great anticipation that we can now welcome another updated version into our development labs, training classes, and forums. I hope you will enjoy this book as much as I have.

Dr. Bjarne Berg

CIO, Comerit Inc. and professor, SAP University Alliance at Lenoir-Rhyne University.