Thursday, September 1, 2011

Learn your BW in hard way

Useful information about BW system is spread into several tables in the system as itself. That’s usual case. Skilled BW guy knows where to look in order to lookup information that is needed. It is common to know basic tables with IOs (RSDIOBJ), reports (RSRREPDIR), cubes (RSDCUBE), DSOs (RSDODSO), process chains (RSPCCHAIN) etc. More technical BW guy would also know where to find information about basic BW system settings (tables RSADMINA, RSADMINS, RSBASIDOC, etc.).
Well we all know that digging into the tables is not very convenient. Therefore I was wondering either there is a functionality that could reveal those system’s secrets at least a bit. More-less by accident I came across one interesting function module. Its name is RS_SYSTEM_INFORMATION and it basically does provide what I just described above. Let’s have a look on it in more detail.
The module has one import parameter which is optional. You do not need to use it and you get (depending on your system) following output:
























What we get is basically set of different information in one place related to: BW backend server version and its highest level of Support Package, HTTP(s) prefixes, either SAP Portal is connected, either information broadcasting is available, server code page, BEx web runtime, RFC destinations (Portal), URL prefixes (web reporting, JAVA based BW-IP Modeler) and ports, workbooks, system category, etc. In addition there is information on BW's frontend requirements from table RSFRONTENDINIT:




















Personally I find this function module quite useful since there is some information collected in one place. I’m not very sure what was an original purpose to develop this nice peace of ABAP. It is contained in development package RS_FRONTEND_INIT which is dedicated to BW Front-End Services. Based on this I can only guess that it all started with information from table RSFRONTENDINIT and later other information was added. If someone of SAP’s developer read this, can you share information on this? :-)

Related posts:

No comments: