Digging into user BEx Analyzer’s Favorites

Sometimes BW people are just ask to loot at user’s reports stored in his Favorites. Business users always do not want to deal with report’s technical names. They just refer to their Favorites and ask to do something with particular report. So be it and as BW developers we need to deal with it.

How to find reports which are stored in someone’s BEx Analyzer Favorites? Table which holds this information is called SMEN_BUFFC. It is common table which holds much more information than just BW’s Favorites. There is information on Favorites in SAP’s GUI SAP Easy Access (like tcodes, folders, URL.), BW reports, ABAP Queries, Report Writers reports etc. To recognize what type of the object is it use field REPORTTYPE, which can have following values:

<space>      ABAP

AQ               Query

BB                Report Portfolio Rpt

LS                Form

RE                Drilldown Reporting

RW               Report Writer Report

TR                Transactions

OT                Other

To get someone’s BW reports a filter on field REPORT and value SAP_BW_QUERY needs to be placed.

Further how to get the BEx query technical name. From the table SMEN_BUFFC take value of corresponding field named SAP_GUID. With value of this field go to table RSRREPDIR and put the value into the field GENUNID on selection.

Is SAP software used in surveillance?

In March of this year strange allegations related to SAP broke into the media. In particular it was related to possible ties between SAP and NSA. Also other article claimed that SAP is working with US intelligence agencies.

Moreover articles mentioned above suggest that SAP HANA is used by these agencies to help with surveillance. If that is true on one hand it would be good for SAP to claim that even the NSA belongs to circle of its customers. However we lie in post Snowden era where everything related to break of privacy is an issue. On other hand it may not need to be necessary good for SAP to have the NSA as a client. Also SAP claimed its gain in could computing was partially driven by customers who do not want to sit their data in US data centers. Revealing its ties to the NSA may not be again be good for SAP’s push to the cloud.

SAP reacted very rapidly on these claims. They published statement related to it. The statement is that they honor every customer. Regardless either it is from public or private sector around a world. They also contradict any allegations related to so called “back doors” in its software.

Whatever truth is one thing matters. SAP can’t do much about the scenarios on how customers do use their software. Even if it is used to the purposes what claims are suggesting into.

Few notes on SAP Screen Personas 3.0

I introduced SAP Screen Personal some time ago here. The Personas is powerful framework to simplify and beautify SAP user interface in particular its screens and transactions. Meanwhile (mid of 2014) the Personas evolved with version 3.0 which bring s lot of new features.

Most important to me is that it doesn’t leverage Microsoft Silverlight anymore for rendering. The Personas 3.0 is integrated fully into HTML as it is part of the SAP GUI for HTML. One down side is here though. Due to technology change a migration of flavors between Personas 2.0 and 3.0 is required. Also the Personas 3.0 is still not officially supported on mobile devices. It is considered as desktop technology. But there are discussions on SCN saying that at least on android based devices it works quite well.

Also scripting in the Personas is very advanced. It includes now more JavaScript language constructions like nested IF conditions and looping.

While using calls to remote enables Function Modules do not forget to perform whitelisting of such a FM. It involves entering the FM into table /PERSONAS/C_RFCW. Whole procedure is very easy and is described here.

Following are few remarks on famous P icon or button of SAP Personas:

Blue bar on top of the page in WebGUI:

or an P icon/button in WebGUI:

or an P icon/button in SAP GUI:

All these indicate that Personas are actually installed in particular SAP system.

Changes to query properties in BW 73 vs 74

While working on BW 74 upgrade I notices there are many changes in BW in many areas. I’m not writing today about some significant new features (new objects types like Advanced DataStore Object; CompositeProvider etc). Just want to mention few remarks on how BW changes over different releases. Particularly in area of Query Properties in tcode RSRT.

BW73:

BW74:

A new checked was added: Calculation of Commutative Formulas After Aggregation.

Dropdown menu of Operation in BWA/HANA was renamed. Option 3 which was called as Standard is called Optimized Access now.

BW73:

BW74:

These changes may look cosmetics thought. However options in Operation in BWA/HANA settings are not. As per the settings in this particular field an query processing is set within BWA or HANA. So far (in 73) standard settings was option 3 = Standard. However having majority of the queries marked as 3 can cause problems in BWA/HANA. These problems can be linked to issues of memory consumptions or data correctness. Therefore as per SAP Note (1790426 - Processing MultiProviders in BWA) the 3 is not default option anymore (e.g. in 74). New default is option 2 = Individual access per InfoProv.

How to find corresponding ABAP report to SAP BW Query

Every SAP BW query or BEx query is associated with ABAP report. The report basically represents what the query does in SAP BW backend. For example there is BEx’s report selection screen in form of ABAP statements, all the data variables declarations, calls to BW data manager etc. Sometimes it is useful to have a look into the report to see things like these. The report is generated whenever the query is saved in BEx Query Designer. Also whenever the query is regenerated in tcode like RSRT the new report is generated. The report has naming convention GP*. The hash followed after GP is generated string. Every time generation happens the old GP* replaced by new one.

Now how to find the GP* report. There are following ways that I’m aware of:

1. tcode RSRT -> button Technical Information -> OLAP-Relevant Data:

2. table RSRREPDIR: find the query entry by field COMPID and OBJVERS = A and the report name is in field RNAME:

Not possible to trigger Process Chain

I recently faced strange situation regarding process chains. It was in system freshly copied form other one.  I wasn’t able to run any of the PC. It didn’t matter whether I tried to run it from tcode like RSPC or via FM (RSPC_CHAIN_START). The PC just didn’t run I there was following work process shown running ABAP report: SAPLRS_GENERAL.

First I tried to reactivate the PCs. It didn’t help nut it gave me a clue pointing to some of processes within the chain which had warnings like this one:

Too many parallel processes for chosen server

Message no. RSPC118

Diagnosis

On the server you have chosen, there are only 0 batch processes available. The process chain has been designed in such as way that 3 processes must be processed parallel.

System Response

Only 0 processes can be processed parallel. Note also that to be able to start sub-chains, AT LEAST TWO free batch processes must be available. Otherwise a lock situation may arise.

For more information, see SAP Note 621400.

Procedure

Reduce the number of parallel processes in the chain or include sub- chains. This warning applies to all relevant processes.

Procedure for System Administration

Increase the number of batch processes available. You should note however that it makes no sense to set up more batch processes than there are CPUs on server.

Based on this I checked how work processes are configured in the system. I saw that there were no background (BGD) work processes available at the moment in the system.

After contacting Basis team; they adjusted no of background work processes in tcode RZ04.

Further information:

621400 - Number of required BTC processes for process chains

519059 - FAQ: Background processing system

1626778 - Consulting: Load distribution of BW background jobs