Characteristics

A characteristic usually denotes a business entity that is being evaluated or measured by a key figure. Characteristics can be either attributes or hierarchies. Attributes are further broken down into display attributes and navigation attributes.

SAP BW hierarchies are represented as hierarchies in Spotfire. Navigation attributes are represented as columns in Spotfire. Display attributes are currently not available in Spotfire.

Navigation attributes can be used in BEx queries for drilling and filtering and are thus visible to Spotfire (in the context of the BEx query).

Note: Navigation attributes appear as display attributes in the context of an InfoCube and are therefore not visible in Spotfire in that context. If you need to access these attributes in Spotfire, the workaround is to create a BEx query based on the InfoCube, and expose the navigation attributes in the BEx query.

Value presentation - Choosing how a characteristic or hierarchy is displayed

For characteristics and hierarchies from SAP BW, you can decide how to display the characteristic in Spotfire. A characteristic in SAP BW can have many types of metadata, such as attributes and technical names. With the Value presentation settings in the Data Selection in Connection dialog, you can choose to use a combination of technical names, a certain attribute, or you can define a custom value presentation.

Note: If you want to use all the metadata for a characteristic or hierarchy in Spotfire, you can do this with a custom value presentation. Then, if you want the metadata in separate columns, you can split the resulting column. Note that you can only split columns when you import data.