Work with Data Change Insights

As application users, you can subscribe to top N data change insights in an analytic application to auto-discover significant data changes of specific charts on a regular basis. As application designers, you can leverage APIs to allow for more activities, such as saving a snapshot to capture any state of your application for data comparison.

About Data Change Insights

The data change insights feature helps you discover chart-level data changes that are important and relevant to you when you aren’t opening and using analytic applications. It needs to be enabled by application designers, so that application users can set daily, weekly or monthly subscription and configure value range to trigger data change insights.

In addition, data change insights can be triggered when there’re value changes across thresholds, value changes across reference lines and top N member changes. For different types of data changes, different chart types are supported:

Data Change Types Supported Chart Types
Value change within or out of range Bar/column, combination column & line, combination stacked column & line, stacked bar/column, waterfall, line, stacked area, bubble, cluster bubble, scatterplot, heat map, radar, tree map, bullet, numeric point, pie, donut, marimekko
Value change across thresholds Bar/column, combination column & line, combination stacked column & line, stacked bar/column, line, stacked area, bubble, cluster bubble, scatterplot, radar, bullet, numeric point, marimekko
Value change across reference lines Bar/column, combination column & line, combination stacked column & line, stacked bar/column, line, stacked area, bubble, scatterplot, radar, marimekko
Top N member change Bar/column, combination column & line, combination stacked column & line, stacked bar/column, waterfall, line, stacked area, bubble, cluster bubble, scatterplot, radar, bullet, numeric point, marimekko

If you’re an application designer, refer to the following sections:

If you’re an application user, refer to:

Data change insights is under the license of scheduling. If you’re an admin, refer to Configure Scheduling.

Note

Data change insights can only be triggered automatically, after the onInitialization event completion and before the PDF generation.

Enable Data Change Insights

You can switch on the overall data change insights function in Analytic Application Details under File.

Then, to enable data change insights for an individual chart, select Data Change Insights under Quick Menus of its Styling panel.

Note

To ensure that application users receive notifications after subscription, you need to add an export to PDF technical object.

Subscribe to Data Change Insights

You can subscribe to data change insights of your analytic application: from Tools in the toolbar, select Subscribe Data Change Insights.

In the dialog you can set subscription details, including:

  • name (by default application name)

  • subscription recurrence: recurrence pattern (day, week or month), frequency, start date and end date

  • maximum insights count (by default 5, no more than 10)

  • sending notifications to email or mobile app, or both

  • skipping notifications when no insights found

  • script variables (if applicable)

  • distribution

    You can share application view with SAP Analytics Cloud recipients. By default the application name and current user are the email subject and recipient respectively. Only one distributed view per subscription is allowed.

From Data Change Insights in the (More Actions) menu of a chart, you can change its subscription mode to Subscribed: Normal Importance, Subscribed: High Importance or Unsubscribed.

Note

Only subscribed charts will be involved in data change insights.

You can select Set Subscription Range to configure the value range to be included or excluded for triggering data change insights.

After subscription, a calendar task is created. If you want to unsubscribe, go to Calendar to remove the task. You can also change the subscription settings there.

You will then receive notifications within the configured period via:

  • emails (one with data change insights, the other with a PDF attachment of the corresponding analytic application)

  • SAP Analytics Cloud notifications

View Data Change Insights

Besides viewing data change insights of individual analytic applications via email and system notifications, you can view all of your data change insights across applications on your SAP Analytics Cloud home screen.

Note

First, you need to add the data change insights tile to your home screen. Go to your user profile, select Home Screen Settings, and switch on Data Change Insights.

There’re two display modes in the data change insights tile:

  • Top N (by default top 10): Displays top N data change insights across applications. From the dropdown menu you can customize the number of insights to be shown on the top N list, ranging from 1 to 20.
  • Notifications: Displays all the data change insights by date. You can see how many data increases, data decreases and top N member changes happened within a certain period and expand to view all the insights.
Note

The tile can display a maximum of 50 data change insights.

Furthermore, you can filter all the data change insights by time range (by default last seven days), importance (by default all) and subscription type, Subscribed by Me (default) or Shared with Me.

Note

Your tile display settings’ll be lost when you refresh the home screen.

You can select each insight to view more detailed information, including data change measure, importance, subscription type and dates for comparison.

The tile is resizable. In the enlarged tile, you can search by keywords from the insights.

Leverage Script APIs

You can add a data change insights scripting object to your analytic application and leverage related APIs to allow for more functionalities:

Code Syntax
// Save a snapshot
// One application can have only one snapshot per day, and the later one will override previous one within the same day.
// Work only when run by snapshot task of scheduling in manual mode.
DataChangeInsights.saveSnapshot(): Boolean
 
// Get a date list which represents there is an application snapshot saved at that date.
// maximumNumber is 10 in backend service configuration.
DataChangeInsights.listRecentSnapshotDates(maximumNumber?: Integer): Array<Date>
 
// Compare current application state with a previous snapshot.
DataChangeInsights.compareApplicationStateWithSnapshot(target: Date, options?: DataChangeInsightsComparisonOptions {
    top?: Integer, // limit number of returned DataChangeInsight
}): DataChangeInsightsResult
 
// Compare two snapshots by date.
DataChangeInsights.compareSnapshots(source: Date, target: Date, options?: DataChangeInsightsComparisonOptions {
    top?: Integer, // limit number of returned DataChangeInsight
}): DataChangeInsightsResult
 
// Similar to Scheduling.isRunBySchedulePublication().
DataChangeInsights.isRunBySnapshotGeneration(): Boolean

For more detailed information about the APIs, refer to the component DataChangeInsights in Analytics Designer API Reference.

Special Cases

  • On application level, no date changes insights will be generated and users will get a warning if:

    • The application gets modified during subscription period (two snapshots from different document save versions).

    • The application view is a different one.

    • The model variables from the URL parameter are changed.

  • On chart level, the comparison within a chart will be ignored if:

    • A chart's model variable is changed.

    • A chart's filter is changed (except for dynamic datetime filter).

    • A chart's calculated measure's referenced script variable is changed.