NUX R-widget as fallback for missing features

OliverIbach

Hi there,

 

The problem

we are building our front end based on NUX Pages in a NUX App. When it comes to creating dashboards for QAS or management reporting there are a ton of features and display options missing. To name a few:

• boxplot diagrams
• month to month transition in waterfall diagrams
• controll over legend size and content in donut diagrams
• relabeling line items
• retrieving color information for dimension member from a configuration table
• Time series animation
• ....

The list goes on and on and on. With the current paste of feature deployment I doubt, that we will have any form of comparable design options as there are in competing product, like Power BI, Tableau, SAC, ThinkCell, etc., any time soon.

 

A solution

So, my suggestion would be to have new widget, which can display R-plots. Therefore:

• The widget excepts an Anaplan view as data source
• It has a title, description and title color, like any other NUX widget
• It has a text box for entering the R-code, which should be executed
• Last code line must return a plotable object, like ggplot
• The R-Code is executed on server site, while building the webpage containing the NUX-Page.
• Some serious security measures have to be done by the Anaplan devs, to prevent a custom code execution meltdown. But that’s not a domain I understand anything meaningful of.

The idea is not new. In fact, SAP implemented such a widget in their product (SAP Analytics Cloud - blogpost to that feature)

 

Final Thoughts

One could argue that the mentioned dashboard solution (Power BI, etc.) are not comparable products to Anaplan and hence all the missing features are not relevant. In reality the user, doesn't care with which technology the presented graphical information was compiled. In our company there are lots of departments using all kind of technology to build dashboards. In the current state the majority leans towards using Power BI for creating and publishing reports. In conclusion most decision makers will derive their requirements for the graphical presentation based on things they have seen so far. Most of this requirement can not be fulfilled by the NUX Page design options. If Anaplan does not provide these options in the foreseeable future, other solutions will be sought. Most of them will lead to downloading the planning results and processing them elsewhere. Which is from an architectural point of view complete nonsense and will lead to a delay between planning and presenting / decision making

IJ

Hello,

 

Actually I would like to know if there is a possibility to integrate R (an open source statistical computing environment: https://www.r-project.org) with Anaplan.

For example Microsoft Power BI and other reporting tools already have such possibility.

 

Thanks and best regards 

OliverIbach

We shifted to using Power BI for reporting purposes. As the Power BI Connector seems to work only with the desktop variant of Power BI we are exporting file with the data which needs to be integrated in the reporting. I am not realy happy with that solution.

IJ

Thanks for your answer.

By any chance, do you have a link to instruction/manual explaining how to make Anaplan data available in Power BI  using this connector?

 

Thanks and best regards

OliverIbach

Sorry for replying lately:

We do not use the connector, hence it works only with standard authentication and not with Single Sign On. Furthermore I do not expect the connector to work with cloud hostet power bi models and dashboards. 

Therefore we are using the anaplan api to export files wir the data we want to be shown in Power BI dashboards.

 

To be more specific. We are using Azure Data Factory to call a self build web service, which represents a wrapper around the anaplan web api. This web service triggers actions (i.g. export actions) in anaplan and handels the returning files, which then will be stored in an Azure Storage Container. Power BI processes these file on the Azure Storage Container.

IJ

Hello,

Thanks a lot for your very detailed answer.

IMHO, the latest version of Anaplan connector allows you to connect using SSO and it also works with cloud based (published) Power BI reports.

At least I can do all these things using the latest version of it.

OliverIbach

Hi,

 

that are great news. We will test this approach soon. That would make our lives a lot easier.

 

Thx for the response.