SAP
BW InA stands for Information Access Protocol
or Info Access Service or Info Access Interface. It is an SAP
internal proprietary protocol used by SAP products to retrieve data from
(embedded) BW or HANA databases. As the protocol is proprietary, there is no
public documentation for this SAP internal protocol. Web services of this
protocol are accessible via URL: https://hostname:port/sap/bw/ina/ Functionalities are codes in ABAP
classes/methods starting with: CL_BICS_INA*. It was delivered since NW 74 SP04.
Originally,
the InA protocol was only used for BPC embedded product its front end tool
called EPM client, which is an add-in to either MS Excel or PowerPoint. Afterwards
InA used increased within other clients and products. These counts Design
Studio, SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), Lumira v2 among others. S/4HANA (cloud or
on-premise) supports a consumption of CDS views through the technical InA
interface.
In
case of e.g. the Design Studio and the SAC it is for pure analytical use cases
that the InA is used for. More over in case of the SAC the InA enables BW’s
Direct Live connections into the SAC.
Furthermore,
in case of BPC’s EPM client the
interface that communicates to NWBPC backend was developed under project code
name FireFly (identified by software
component BW-RUI-BPC-WEB-FLY - BPC -
Consumption of the Firefly Consumption API). At least this seems to be the case
based on SAP Notes that are containing a phrase - Firefly. Leveraging the INA
Provider connection, it is possible to do the following in the EPM client:
Work with BW queries (with or without
variables)
Retrieve data, using reports
Enter and save data, using input forms
Execute planning function for BW Integrated
Planning
Technically the FireFly client is implemented as BSP app called BPCWEBCLIENT. You can observe its javascript libraries code in t-code SE80 while browsing the BSP app mentioned. In addition, an link to SAP’s internal documentation is mentioned within the code:
https://wiki.wdf.sap.corp/wiki/display/firefly/Runtime+Versioning
More
information:
Software
component: BW-BEX-OT-BICS-INA InA functionality
