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.
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.
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.