Imagine you're building an SAP Analytics Cloud story and realize the standard visualizations don't quite capture the specific insights you need. Custom widgets allow you to extend SAP Analytics Cloud's capabilities, creating unique visualizations and interaction patterns tailored to your exact requirements.
This lesson provides an introduction to custom widgets, explaining their purpose and how they fit into the SAP Analytics Cloud environment. The lesson will focus on how you, as an advanced SAP Analytics Cloud user, can leverage them to create truly bespoke analytics experiences.
Custom Widgets in SAP Analytics Cloud Stories
Standard components form the fundamental building blocks of SAP Analytics Cloud stories. You use these components to present data, facilitate user interaction, and structure the story's layout.
SAP Analytics Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of standard components, including charts, tables, input controls, and text elements. These components are designed to address a wide range of analytical and planning requirements and serve as the primary tools for most SAP Analytics Cloud users.
Custom widgets in SAP Analytics Cloud empower you, as an advanced user, to enhance the platform by developing reusable components that cater to specialized needs. Unlike standard components, which are designed for general analytical and planning tasks, custom widgets enable you to create specific visualizations and interaction methods.
Custom widgets are used in scenarios where:
- a specialized visualization is required,
- a custom interaction pattern is needed,
- development resources are available.
In practice, custom widgets are typically developed by technical users or developers, while story authors can reuse them across multiple stories without needing to modify the underlying code
Understanding custom widgets
A custom widget is a reusable component that can be added to SAP Analytics Cloud stories, functioning like any other component from a user’s perspective. You can place it on a story page, configure it through properties, and link it to a data model.
From a technical perspective, a custom widget is built using web technologies and consists of:
- a metadata file (JSON), which defines how the widget is identified and configured in SAP Analytics Cloud,
- one or more JavaScript Web Components, which implement the widget’s behavior and rendering.
The metadata file acts as a bridge between SAP Analytics Cloud and the Web Component implementation, enabling SAP Analytics Cloud to interpret the widget's properties, data bindings, and events.
This separation between metadata and implementation allows custom widgets to be reusable, configurable, and maintainable across different stories and use cases.
Custom Widgets and the Unified Story Experience
Custom widgets are fully supported in the Unified Story (Optimized Design Experience). This ensures that custom-developed components follow the same design and interaction principles as standard widgets.
Within a Unified Story, custom widgets:
- can be added from the widget panel
- can be configured using properties
- can interact with story filters and data.
From the perspective of a story consumer, custom widgets integrate seamlessly into the overall user experience.
Summary
- Custom widgets extend SAP Analytics Cloud's capabilities beyond standard components, providing specialized visualizations and interactions.
- Custom widgets extend SAP Analytics Cloud by enabling reusable, developer-built components that integrate seamlessly into stories. They are defined through metadata and implemented using web technologies, while remaining fully compatible with the Unified Story experience.