Ross Goodman » Xcelsius 2008

Running – Dashboard – Marcothon

Ross (Admin) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:37:47 +0000

I’m building up for my running challenges of 2011 and breaking in my new treadmill so I am slowly building up my miles.
On incentive is the Marcothon group on FaceBook, the basic premis is to run for either 3 miles or 25 minutes in every day in December.

I have also been mucking around with Xcelsius for a parkrun project, more on that later.
To keep an eye on my progress I have built a dashboard to track my running over the current year and so I can visually compare my training year on year.

A Year In Retrospect

Ross (Admin) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:33:08 +0000

Just a quick summary of my on-line presence this year.

Twitter

I have invested a lot of content to Twitter this year.
This is primarily due to the convenience of the platform racking up almost 1200 updates in the year here.

Flickr / Photography

I can’t find a way to get stats for the year so here are my top five photos:

Web Site / Blog

By far the most popular post on the site was the photos page here.
Second most popular page is the “About Me” page here.
As for the blog entries themselves they rank at:
1 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Conditional Prompts
2 – Crystal Xcelsius – Filtered Rows From A Filter Component
3 – Modelling Change In Your Dimensions
4 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Change Data Tracking
5 – Dimensional Modelling – Facts
As you can see here the site only really started getting traffic last January so that gives me 17300 page views.

Personal Stuff

Obviously the biggest news of the year was the passing of my daughter Emma.
Celebrating the Life of Emma Berry Goodman
And the year ends on another low point with the passing of another member of my extended family.
George Miller – Footballer | 1939 – 2008

Crystal Xcelsius – Filtered Rows From A Filter Component

Ross (Admin) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:11:27 +0000

This is really obvious with hindsight but it took me ages before “the penny dropped”.
Most of the time I find myself using the “Filtered Rows” option on my selectors.
The main selector that I want to use is the “Filter”, but strangely this does not have the option of filtered rows.
What I have resorted to doing in the past is to use multiple selectors:
A date drop down list box filters the rows from “Raw Data” sheet to the “Monthly” sheet.
A product drop down list box filters the rows from the “Monthly” sheet to the “MonthlyProducts” sheet.
A customer drop down list box filters the rows from the “MonthlyProducts” sheet to the “MonthlyProductsCustomers” sheet which now lists all of the sales made for that combination.
The filter component could do that, but this component assumes that there will only be a single row in the output. As soon as you have multiple rows in your result set then you can’t use the filter component.
Ahhh, but you can with a little lateral thinking; that’s what Xcelsius is all about.

In my “RawData” sheet I have the columns Date, Product, Customer and then some other raw data columns. To the right of the Customer column I insert a new column and call it “Key”, this contains a formula to concatenante the three previous columns together

=a2 & “-” & b2 & “-” & c2

I then build a filter component that looks at A2:D500 and tell it that I want three filters.
I tell it that the destination cell is on a separate sheet “Controls!A1″, I call this cell the “SelectedKey”
This gives me a component that allows me to select the unique combination of the three keys, Date, Product and Customer and record the selected value, but how do I then show the multiple rows that are associated with this SelectedKey?
Use a ComboBox component:
The labels come from the key column RawData!D2:D500
The Insertion Type is Filtered Rows.
The Source Data is RawData!D2:Z500
The Destination is a new sheet FilteredRows!D2:Z500
On the Behaviour tab set the selected item to reference Controls!A1 which stores the selected key.
When the filter component selection changes, the SelectedKey is updated, this changes the selected value in the Combo Box which filters the rows.
We don’t want the users to see the Combo Box so my preference is to create a panel container and put all of my “hidden” or “debugging” components in it. The panel container can then be hidden using the Dynamic Visibility setting.

In my example I wanted to filter multiple datasets using the same criteria so I simply added multiple Combo Box components, each with their own source and destination ranges but each referring to the same selected key field.
This was by far the easiest way to implement this.

I know that I should be using QAAWS or Live office and doing this all interactively, but for this customer they wanted to manipulate a static dataset.