SAP Visual Business
SAP Visual Business is a user interface technology that visualizes data from SAP and external data sources on a single screen.
Visual Business applications not only combine different types of content, but also include interactive graphics that visualize and combine enterprise data with geographical or three-dimensional real-world scenes.
You can use Visual Business applications both to display and to transact with back-end system data, since you have your enterprise data at hand as well as interactions you need to control various business situations. The visual presentation makes the data much more tangible to the user, without the need for detailed explanations on fields, tabs, and in tables.
If you use SAP solutions or applications that integrate Visual Business applications, you must install SAP Visual Business.
SAP solutions or applications, for example, SAP Transportation Management, create SAP Visual Business applications to depict their business processes visually. The Visual Business application is embedded in the integrating application, for example, by means of Web Dynpro technology.
Exactly which SAP Visual Business features are realized depends on the integrating application involved. For more information about the features realized in a particular integrating application, see the corresponding documentation in SAP Library.
Your business processes can be reflected in a Visual Business application by means of the following main features:
Scenes and Visualization Objects
The scene is the graphical background to a Visual Business application. It is realized as a three– dimensional space, either on the basis of a map (3D geographical scene) or without a map (3D graphical scene). The scene typically contains visualization objects (VOs), which can represent various objects from business scenarios, such as factories, machines, or trucks as well as your turnover, revenues, or spending value. The actual data behind the VOs is provided by SAP back-end systems. The concept involving scenes and VOs makes the visualization of business processes extremely flexible.
Properties and Interactions
Appearance and behavior of a VO are influenced by its properties and interactions: a tooltip or the size of a VO can represent, for example, the turnover resulting from business with a particular customer, while a click or a double-click the VO can open a callout window with an overview of a warehouse’s current capacity. A VO can also provide you with a context menu containing several menu items that can cause various further actions. Thus, VOs can be used to visualize nearly every kind of business data and then to connect it to the Visual Business application. Finally, VOs do also support drag and drop operations, which are completely under application control.
Additional Windows
A Visual Business application can contain additional windows that themselves are based on scenes. These windows can represent and illustrate further business data separated from data on the main scene. In addition, they provide further interaction capabilities.
Web Dynpro Integration
Web Dynpro integration provides the possibility to seamlessly integrate SAP Visual Business into standard SAP functionality:
If a Visual Business application is embedded into a Web Dynpro application, the integrating application can define a data exchange between the Visual Business application and the embedding Web Dynpro. Thus, data available within the Web Dynpro can be used to illustrate various business elements such as locations of factories, customers, or suppliers. These business elements can be directly displayed as VOs on the map of the Visual Business application.
Personalization and Navigation, and Cache Control
For information about how to control, navigate, and select objects within a Visual Business application, see Personalization and Navigation.
Visual Business applications are always embedded in an integrating application, for example by means of Web Dynpro technology. Visual Business applications do not run in standalone mode.