Presentation Outline:

 

Accessing Excel Spreadsheets from Xcelsius
A Web Service Approach

Gabriel Monge-Franco
Mitch Hite
January 18, 2010
Copyright © 2010 Spectrum Health

Agenda

• Overview of Xcelsius
• Data connections in Xcelsius
• Business needs for Excel as a data source
• Overview of Web Services
• Accessing Excel via Web Services
• Examples/Demo
• Q&A

What is Xcelsius?

• SAP’s dashboard design and publishing software
• Gives instant visibility into timely and relevant data to aid business users in making the right decisions
• Designer uses embedded Excel to manipulate data
• Dashboards are published in Flash, PDF or Microsoft Office formats, making them very portable and flexible

How do Xcelsius dashboards retrieve data?

• Static Dashboards
• Imports data into embedded Excel at design time

• Connected Dashboards
• Imports/Exports data at run time
• Web Services (SOAP)
• XML
• Crystal Reports
• No support for Excel!

Why use Excel for dashboards?

• Customers sometimes compile data from multiple, non-data warehouse sources into spreadsheets for executive reporting
• Excel is flexible
• Spreadsheets are an easy place to store volatile data, such as announcements, latest news, web site links, preferences and user notes
• Almost everyone is familiar with spreadsheets
• Business users like Excel

So how do we use Excel in Xcelsius?

• Export to XML, convert the XML to a flat format that Xcelsius understands, and publish to a web server
• Write a plug-in for Xcelsius to read Excel
• Solution would be tied to Xcelsius
• Write a web application to read Excel and return XML
• Users have to know the range and variable names
• Write a web service to read Excel and return XML
• Users can see a list of fields and required parameters
• Spectrum Health’s approach

What is a web service?

• Application Programming Interface (API) that can be accessed over the web
• Used by client and server applications to communicate over HTTP
• In our case, the client (dashboard) talks to the server to request data. The server responds with the data requested (in XML format)

How do we access Excel via a Web Service?
Three components: Dashboard (flash), web server (web service), file share (Excel files)

1. Dashboard: Request file.xls
2. Web service: Get file.xls from File Share
3. Web service: Read file.xls into memory
4. Web service: Convert data to flat XML file (/variable/row/col)
5. Web service: Return data
6. Dashboard: Display data

Demo and Examples
Hold on tight!

Questions and Answers
Thank You!

Gabriel Mongefranco 194 days ago