Sunday, August 6, 2017

Setting up a global template for BW workbooks

Templates used by BW (BEx) reports can be customized in BW system. There can be either global template for all users in the system or each user can have different template assigned. All this customizing is to be done in table RSRWBTEMPLATE – “Assignment Excel workbooks as personal templates”. I thought that I write some information about the table as it wasn’t much known to me until now.

If user has particular template customized there is an entry for such a user. Field TEMPLATEUSER contains user ID and the field WORKBOOKID contains the workbook ID.
All other users that do not have an entry in the table are using template that is stored in the table row that has blank TEMPLATEUSER field but there is a value in the filed WORKBOOKID. So this is how global default workbook is set up in the table.

Now how to actually customize the table? There is no maintenance view generated for the table either there is no entry in the SPRO t-code. All the customizing is actually done via BEx Analyzer. Here it is available in menu on BEx toolbar: BEx Analyzer -> Global Settings -> Select “Default Workbook” tab. In this popup there are following buttons available:

·         Use Current – user can set as global template current template that is opined in BEx
·         Use Default – if user has specific workbook setup this will overwrite it with default one
·         Use SAP Standard – this removes specific workbook set for user and SAP default one will be used. The SAP default workbook cannot be adjusted or modified.

There is also a checkbox called “Global Default Workbook” available on the same tab. By ticking off it the selected workbook as the default workbook will be used for all users.

One may ask if there is any difference between BW 3.x and 7.x with regards to the customizing of default workbook ID. BW 3.x there were only 2 fields in the table: TEMPLATEUSER and WORKBOOKID. In BW 7.x a third field was added: LEAST_BEX_VERSIO which tells about version of BEx. If the value in there is 70 it is obvious that the systems run BW 7.x.

The table values can be also manipulated by custom ABAP program. See as an example this ghist by JouryJonkergouw.

Also as per SAP Note 1963326 there is a bug that allows user w/o proper authorization to change the Global Default Workbook (template) used in BEx Analyzer. The Note explicitly says that it is happening in SAP GUI 7.3 but as per my testing also SAP GUI 74 is effected as well.


More information:
1963326 - BEx Analyzer: Global Default Workbook can be changed by enduser without having authorization

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