Extending Intelligent Applications

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to describe how to extend an Intelligent Application

Extend the dashboard

Intelligent applications are managed by SAP, meaning that only SAP can create them, update their content, and manage their lifecycle. This restriction applies to the generated Datasphere artifacts and also to the generated SAP Analytics Cloud stories.

So how do you extend and adjust the SAP-managed intelligent applications? Is this even possible?

The good news is that is possible to extend and adjust SAP-managed intelligent applications.

Introduction

Although you cannot adjust the SAP-managed intelligent applications, you can make a copy of them and then make the adjustments on the copied versions.

Before we learn how to extend and adjust intelligent applications, let's consider some examples of why you might want to do this:

  • Include additional SAP-managed data products that are not part of the standard intelligent application
  • Include non-SAP data in the SAP-managed intelligent application
  • Develop new KPIs and add them to the dashboard of the intelligent application
  • Modify or add new widgets into the dashboards of the intelligent application. For example, add new charts or drop-down filters
  • Add your company branding or additional texts or links to the dashboard
  • Simplify or fine-tune an intelligent application for a specific group of business users.

Extending the Story

Let's examine a scenario where you would like to adjust or extend the dashboard content of the intelligent application by including some drop-down filters and additional charts.

Copy a story to extend the content of the dashboard

In this scenario, the extensions you require do not affect the underlying data models in Datasphere and only affect the SAP Analytics Cloud story.

In this case you simply copy the SAP-managed story to a custom story. The data sources from the original story are retained by the copied story. Technically, the data sources of the story are the analytical models in Datasphere.

You are now able to make the adjustments to the copied story.

Caution

Subsequent enhancements delivered by SAP to the original story will not be automatically applied to the copied story. You must adapt your copied story manually.

If you copied the SAP-delivered story and are using the same underlying model in Datasphere, you can delete the original SAP-delivered story, and the underlying model will be retained because your copied story depends on it.

Adjusting Authorizations

Installing Authorizations

Once you have adjusted the copied story you need to define authorizations.

Steps to install authorizations, refer to the surrounding text.

The following authorization related steps are necessary:

  1. Define customer-managed spaces:

    You need to define spaces for the topics you want to separate. .

  2. Share deployed objects with customer-defined spaces.

  3. Define a scoped role for the new space.

  4. Assign Users to a Scoped Role:

  5. Define a Data Access Controls (DAC)

  6. Define a view and assign one or more Data Access Controls (DAC).

When an intelligent application is installed, corresponding SAP Datasphere objects are installed together with them. Typically, there is at least one view is already linked to a Data Access Control. In such cases, you need to simply enter the users and values to the underlying permission table.

Extend the data model

Extending the Data Models

Let's examine a scenario where you would like to adjust or extend the data models of the intelligent application by including additional data products that will be used to define new dimensions and measures. We would of course, need to also adjust the story to consume the new dimensions and measures by adding new charts or other visualization objects.

Copy data models before extending them

In this scenario we need to do the following:

  1. Copy the SAP Analytics Cloud story to a custom workspace.
  2. Copy the Datasphere spaces for Preparation and Application so that all of the modeling artifacts are duplicated.
  3. Adjust the mapping of the data source for the story because the copied story will still point to the SAP-delivered Application space. The data sources in the copied story should point to the analytic models in the copied Application space

We then can apply our adjustments to the models and story.

We do not need to remap the Application space to the Preparation space because the copy process takes care of the remapping.

As we are reusing the SAP-delivered Ingestion space, the mapping between our copied Preparation space and the Ingestion space will need to be adjusted.

Caution

Subsequent enhancements delivered by SAP to the modeling artifacts in the original spaces will not be automatically applied to the copied spaces. You must adapt the modeling artifacts in your copied spaces manually.

Let's Summarize What You've Learned

In this lesson, you've learned how to extend an intelligent application using best practices.

  • You've learned how to extend the dashboard by copying the story in SAP Analytics Cloud and remapping the data connection to the underlying data models in Datasphere.

  • You've learned how to extend the data model by making copies of the application and preparation spaces in Datasphere.

Learning
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