SAP Analytics Cloud Story

Speaking of advanced, the Advanced Mode was introduced with the Story 2.0 Update and strategically replaces the SAC Analytics Designer. The Advanced Mode allows a more tech-savvy user to extend any drag-and-drop Story with powerful, coded business logic, interaction and styling.

The integration of scripting possibilities within the Story-Tool is the main benefit over Analytic Applications, as the user does not have to choose a Tool at the start of a project.

It’s the last 20% for advanced interactive features, small parts of Business Logic and styling that you will need the Advanced Mode of the Story Designer for.

Want to group two categories together in a dropdown? Need things to change according to a fixed day in the month?

Then the Advanced Mode will be the right fit for you. It does require script knowledge though, so you might want to ask your friendly neighborhood IT-Professional.

Don’t be afraid to try out the Advanced Mode, as the Story 2.0 Update lets you toggle the Advanced Mode seamlessly on and off. Prior to the unified Story Update, the Advanced Mode was its own tool called Analytics Designer.

A pretty default case for any modern dashboard is to have a button that toggles between views or shows a popup. To implement such behaviors in SAC Story, you’ll need to code those interactions within the Advanced Mode.

Furthermore it lets you create powerful scripts that react to events such as a user clicking on data in a chart or the user changing the page.

Coding and designing intuitive interactions is what gives SAC Story the edge over other Dashboarding Tools like Salesforce Tableau or Microsoft PowerBI, where custom interactions are either hard or impossible to implement.

Given enough time and effort to develop a SAC Story, the result will be a polished Web-Application with delightful little UI-/UX-Details. If done correctly, Scripts will allow you to make previously thought complex and unintuitive interactions flow seamlessly throughout the Report.

If you thought that scripts in the Advanced Mode take your reports to another level, let’s talk Custom Widgets. Did you ever need a specific visualization that the SAC does not offer? Believe us, this rarely happens, but there is a solution for this too. Custom Widgets allow for the creation of a visualization tailored to your needs. Complete with interactions and data access from all regular SAC Models. The result might be a complex chart, a more complex table or something else entirely, like a KPI tile.

Speaking of tiles, we actually developed a SAC Custom Widget for an advanced KPI tile that displays YTD comparisons and a time series out-of-the-box. No more creating 50+ elements for a KPI tile and duplicating those to have multiple tiles.

For those little touch ups that add a lot to the polish and the look-and-feel of any report you can utilize the CSS component of SAC Story Advanced Mode. This lets you change the default appearance of elements for example setting the default text color for all text elements. 

Defining your own CSS classes will help you change things around dynamically, like changing the text color or border of a button the user just toggled.

Though the SAC allows you to to write CSS, note that it is unfortunately strictly limited to a few selectors (elements that you can style) and properties (like text color, size or border-properties). So the SAC CSS is only a subset of proper CSS and does not allow you to position elements, create beautiful animations or target SAC’s default elements.

We hope that this will improve in the future as we are getting tired of our developers complaining that they could make this dashboard even more perfect if they only could write proper Javascript or CSS.