SAP Design Studio Export: How to include meta information

I believe that our previous posts have already shown how feature-rich and flexible our biExport for Design Studio is.I am absolutely confident to say there is no requirement from your business or your project that cannot be met by our solution. Moreover, I am quite sure there will be one or the other feature that will stimulate your creativity of how to make reporting processes more efficient: e.g. iterative exorts,adding multiple views flexibly to one document, beautiful but straight-forward publishing features.

This blog entry is meant to be the kick of to show you these enhanced features of our export solution. Today, for a start, I want to show you how to add meta information to your export document.

SAP's standard function

As you probably know, SAP's standard export only allows for export to PDF in a quite basic way. However, you are already able to flag meta information to be displayed.What I've heard from a lot of customers though is that they would like to have more freedom to define which meta information to export!

Let's say you have some static filters in your query, probably they are even only there for technical reasons. Fiscal Year Variant or Last Request are typical examples. Do you really want to show this information to your end users in the export?

How to add meta information to your exports!

This feature is available for all export formats: PDF, PowerPoint, Word and Excel. For PDF, you can even use it in headers and footers, so the meta information is automatically repeated on each page!

To include meta information, you make use of a placeholder, which is marked being surrounded by "%". These placeholders can be used in the following parameters of our Design Studio export component:

• PowerPoint Template
• Word Template
• Excel Template
• HTML Template (PDF)
• Header HTML (PDF)
• Footer HTML (PDF)
• Bookmark Template (PDF)

 There are four different ways of how to include meta information into the export:

1. General meta information

Here is a bunch of general placeholders that we provide:

 

2. Meta information that is already contained on the Design Studio application page

Meta information (such as filters) is often displayed to the end user. That's why these pieces of information are already contained in the source of our export.

Let's assume there is a filter panel with the technical name FILTER_PANEL_1, which contains several text components to display the filters (TEXT_1, TEXT_2, etc.).To include the meta information also in the export, you have several options:

• write %FILTER_PANEL_1% to move the full meta information into the export document
• write %TEXT_1%, %TEXT_2% separately to rearange the meta information in the export

 The second option makes especially sense if you export to PowerPoint or Word, and you want to display filters in a header line or slide title.For PowerPoint, Word or Excel Templates you may also control wether the information shall be rendered as an image, as a text with formatting of Design Studio (suffix :TEXT) or as a text with formatting of the template (suffix :VALUE).

Note:

Of course you can also use this way to export meta information that shall not be displayed to the end user.Simply add a text component to show this information. The hide it with our openbihidden class (do not use the SAP function Visibility = false!). You can still access the text component in the export document.

3. Pass custom meta information

If the meta information is not already displayed to the user, you can simply add it to the export via the "Custom Texts Array".

Example:

With the following JSON string for Custom Texts Array, we replace custom placeholder %DEPARTMENT% with “Financials” and %USERNAME% with “William Smith”.
 [{"DEPARTMENT": "Financials"},{ "USERNAME": "William Smith"}]

4. Meta information of the data source

Our export component is also capable of accessing the meta information of the data sources and make them available in your export. This way you can also export meta information that is neither displayed to the end user (option 2) nor manually passable (option 3).

Some examples of what you can do (for more, please check out our documentation!):