Using Images in Reports
One of my favorite things to do in E-Sourcing and CLM is to develop reports. I have worked with many customers over the years to develop queries and reports using the proprietary report development environment in E-Sourcing.
A couple years back, SAP added the capability for report developers to include images in the report results. You might have seen this capability at work in some standard reports, such as the Project Status Summary report shown here.
Project Status Summary (click to enlarge)
This report nicely shows how color images can be applied to result columns providing visual queues to the end user.
I recently was working on a report for a client and used images in another way: as a button for a drill down report. The original report requirements called for the report to show estimated value totals aggregated by the business unit and to hyperlink those totals to the individual projects that made up the totals. Unfortunately, hyperlinking the totaled values threw the formatting off by left justifying the values and removing the numeric formatting. The next graphic shows that result.
Drilldown Report Available on Numeric Data (click to enlarge)
The alternative approach I chose makes the drilldown report available via an image (used like a button) in the report results and allows the estimated value data to be shown correctly as a numeric value.
Drilldown Report Available on Image (click to enlarge)
The setup required for this is really easy. First, you need to create the image that you want to use for your drilldown link. In my case, I chose to use a magnifying glass since that is a common user interface metaphor for getting more details. This image is then loaded into E-Sourcing/CLM in the File Attachment Container area (Setup > System Setup > User Interface > File Attachment Container). Typically, the “path” I provide to such images will be like: /reportimages/<gif file name>
Once the image is loaded, you need to create two (2) localized resources. They are shown in the next graphic:
Localized Resources for Image (click to enlarge)
These localized resources are used to show text and the image in the report. Notice that the first one with the text value does not contain the .image suffix. The second localized resource identifier contains the .image suffix and the value must be the value of the “path” field on the File Attachment Container object previously created.
The last component to change is the query that contains the drilldown. The URL column that links to the drilldown report should have the “Show Image” field set to Image Only; And, the value of the URL column must be the localized resource created above (without the .image suffix). Have a look at the next graphic to see the definition of the URL result column.
URL Query Column Definition (click to enlarge)
I hope you found this interesting and maybe inspired you to try using images in your reports.
In a future post, I will write about another report I wrote using checkbox images that enabled some very interesting update capabilities from a list view.