Combine SAP NetWeaver BW, Xcelsius, and Crystal Reports for Personalized Reporting

by Ingo Hilgefort, Group Product Manager focusing on Embedded Analytics at SAP (August 2009)

Find out how you can combine Xcelsius 2008 and Crystal Reports 2008 with your SAP NetWeaver BW system to show aggregated data in your dashboard and then navigate to the detailed data in Crystal Reports. By combining these two applications, you can show highly summarized data to your executives and managers, while allowing analysts to drill down to a Crystal Reports object to view more details about the data.

Categories: BI/BW, Crystal Reports, Report Building, SAP BusinessObjects, Xcelsius

Key Concept

Xcelsius allows you to create stunning data visualizations and Crystal Reports allows you to create detailed-oriented, formatted reports. You can use both applications on top of your SAP data. By combining them, you can enable the navigation from aggregated data in your dashboard to detailed data in your formatted report.

You can combine Xcelsius visualization with a report created in Crystal Reports to take advantage of the summarized data in Xcelsius and the detailed reporting in Crystal Reports. I will show you how to enhance an Xcelsius dashboard so that the user can view aggregated data in the dashboard. The user can then navigate from the dashboard to a detailed Crystal Reports object, which retrieves the data from a DataStore object (DSO) layer.

In the first article in this update, I created an Xcelsius dashboard that shows the open orders value broken down by country. The user can select the time frame for the shown data. For the Crystal Reports object, you use the DSO layer and show the open order value by region and material. In addition, you can filter the data by country and a time range, whereby the selection values are transferred to the Crystal Reports object from the Xcelsius dashboard each time the user navigates to the detailed report.

For the Crystal Reports object, I’m using the SAP NetWeaver BW query shown in Figure 1.

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