Design Studio conditional formatting on SAP HANA

When working with Design Studio connecting directly to SAP HANA, I encountered an instance where conditional formatting was needed. The requirement was quite easy; an actual is compared against a maximum.  If the actual is higher it should be displayed in red.

After looking around I found that there is no ‘out of the box’ feature supporting this. I came up with the idea to pass an HTML tag from a calculated column in SAP HANA, so that I could then use CSS to format it as desired in Design Studio. The steps are outlined below.

SAP HANA 

First add a calculated column in the calculation view in SAP HANA. The formula below compares the two values. If Actual is higher than the Maximum, a text string is returned, formatted as follows:

<circle></circle><alert1>4290</alert1>

Basically this formula adds HTML tags to enclose the Actual value of 4290 in this example.

if("ACTUAL">" MAXIMUM",'<circle></circle><alert1>'+STRING(ROUND("ACTUAL",0))+'</alert1>','STRING(ROUND("ACTUAL",0))')

Some drawbacks are:

1. The result is an attribute and not a measure, so the result will not be aggregated to a total.
2. As Design Studio requires a measure in the data source, so a dummy measure might be needed, this can be hidden later.

Design Studio

You can hide the dummy measure by setting the column width to zero in the Design Studio cross tab:

Finally you can add a custom CSS file to your Design Studio document,  to format your conditional value. For example:

alert1 {

position: relative;

float: right;

width: 85%;

color: RGB(212,46,18);

text-align: left;

border-radius: 5px;

}

circle {

display: none;

float: left;

position: relative;

top: 2px;

background: RGB(212,46,18);

border: 4px solid RGB(212,46,18);

border-radius: 50%;

}

This should then give you something like this.

So in conclusion,  this is a bit of a work-around but it did solve my conditional formatting challenge. I hope you found it useful.