Subscription to updates of SAP notes

Have you read some SAP note at one certain point of time and once you return back you wondering it has been changed over time being? Yes, SAP notes are very often updated. Notice field version on header of note. To get notified when note is changed you have possibility to subscribe to note.
Following see procedure for subscription:

1. First you need to check if you added your email into your profile. Check this under service.sap.com/support -> MyProfile (in the header) -> My personal data -> e-mail.

2. Browse SAP note that you want to subscribe for; e.g. Note 886102 - System Landscape Copy for SAP BW and NW BI. On the header of note notice a link called Subscribe. Finally by clicking on it you get popup to confirm subscription.

- update 07/02/2011 - 
See in this post how email with subscribed SAP Notes look like.

Few more BEx messages 2

After posting probably the most re-occurring BEx’s error – related to lib32rfc.dll I collected few more messages that programs of BEx Suite’s used to throw.

1. Message given by BEx while backend BW system is not accessible. E.g. you got disconnected from network.

 

2. This message you usually get only once when you connect to BW backend for first time via BEX Web Application Designer. System does download all metadata from the ABAP Stack of BW server. Download directory is following:
X:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\SAP\BEx\WAD\MD\\WADMD\\.

Folder can be customized by setting value to BEXWAD_METADATADIR environment variable in your operational system.

  

3. Once you are trying to open BW query created in BEx version 7.x on older version of SAP BEx Query Designer, e.g. version 3.x.

 

4. In case you are running corrupted installation of SAP GUI:

Error message "missing ActiveX component: SAP business explorer open/save dialog".

You have to reinstall it again.

5. Web Application Designer or BEx Query Designer used to thrown message indicating that standard transport system of BW has been activated for BW BEx’s objects. This means that objects are not automatically put into $TMP development package but system asks for transport request no. each time you create new object. You can switch on/off Standard Transport System of BW within following path:

TA RSA1->Transport Connection->menu Edit->Transport
->Switch-On Standard
->Switch-Off Standard
 

 

 
Thinking of other BEx's messages? Keep visiting this blog they are coming soon :-)

SAP GUI visual designs

In addition to one of my very first posts (Short history of SAP GUI) related to SAP GUI I’m posting some more information about SAP GUI themes that are available as of mid 2009. A term theme is used by SAP to describe so called skin or visual design of its front-end components.
To continue where I stopped in post of Short history of SAP GUI I would like to focus on version of 6.x and 7.x of GUI. 
 
In version 6.20 following designs were added to complete so called "Classic" and "EnjoySAP" themes: "Streamline" and "Tradeshow".

 
Within version of 7.10, a brand new Signature Design was added.

To get it all together see following overview:
 

1. Classic or Accessibility theme: Probably the most know version. Comprises of design that was standard for OS Windows 95 based applications. Includes advanced features for keyboard access.

 

2. MS Windows theme: Is reused Classic or Accessibility theme.

 

3. EnjoySAP: A design produced specially for SAP by Frog Design company. First was offered within GUI 4.6 based on ZEN design. It is excellent to Classic theme from an ergonomic point of view.

 

4. High Contrast: Based on EnjoySAP theme as its variant. Dedicated to users requiring an especially heavy contrast with high contrast colors: like dark foreground and bright background colors.

 

 

5. Streamline: Yet another EnjoySAP theme that is adjusted to the design of the Enterprise Portal. It is mostly in decent blue color and brighter blue bottoms.

 

6. Tradeshow: Based on refinement Streamline theme. Again mostly in blue color for better output on projectors.

 

 

7. SAP Signature Design: The new SAP design that is to be provided unified face for all SAP UI technologies intended to harmonize those UIs. Since screenshot fo TA RSA1 is provided in this post here see TA SE38.

 

8. System Default theme: Also known as System Dependent. Theme is determined by system into which GUI is getting to be connected. Customizing of this feature is done by parameter sapgui/theme of system profile. Following values are available:

"ENJOY"          = SAP GUI New Visual Design from 2000DEFAULT
"STREAMLINE" = NetweaverVisual Design from 2003
"TRADESHOW" = NetweaverVisual Design from 2004
 

New Signature Design for SAP GUI

Are you aware that SAP GUI is re-designed in brand new fashion design? To be honest I wasn’t for quite a log time. I suddenly found that why I was roaming in Control Panel of my Windows installation. Here under settings of “SAP Configuration” I found new item related to SAP signature Design.

 

According SAP this new design of SAP GUI was introduced in 3rd quarter of 2008 (approximately around end of November 2008) due to GUI 6.4 end of maintenance. New design is valid only for versions 7.1 and higher. Actually I was able to recognize it after I installed patch 11, 7.10C3.  

 

The purpose of new design is to align with state of the art visual designs similar to Microsoft products like Windows Vista or Office 2007. Other reason is to unite all previous design of SAP’s front-end components to one User Interface layout. This is so called harmonization of look and feel SAP applications. For more information see official SAP Note 1233328 - SAP Signature Design for SAP GUI for Windows.

For hose who are curious how Signature design look like see TA RSA1 in all its beauty:

Most famous BW backend SAP developer

During my all long SAP tenure I got used that if I really need to understand how and why system is behaving like it does I need to start up debugger and debug it. Since very first time I started with BW I noticed ABAP code commented out by one particular SAP employee called Matthias Lux. There are some many places within code where his simple statements like:

*break luxm. "#EC NOBREAK

If you ever debugged any SAP BW code you anticipated it.

He contributes into a lot of SAP Notes related to BW, like following one: 978194 - 70SP10: RSAOLTP 380 when activating DataStore object 

 

I have no clue how much people from SAP AG is working on new releases, support packages, etc. of SAP BW but they might be around hundred people. So I consider Mr. Lux is greater contributor to SAP BW backend development, his contribution can be comparable to involvement of Dr. ABAP to overall SAP technology. Good job Mr. Lux; keep going.

The highest data load "Request ID" no. you ever seen in SAP BW system?

Recently I noticed in system of my current costumer quite high no. of data load request ID. I was wondering if this is the highest no that I ever seen. Actually I wasn’t very interesting in that so far; so it might be that I’ve seen higher no in other system before.

Request ID is being generated in system by number range (TA SNRO, table for range is NRIV) called RS_OBJNUMG within a range from 0000001 to 9999000. This means 9,9 millions data requests you can have. A database table where Request IDs are stored is RSICCONT in columns RNSIDLAST. It is very important to have consistent Request IDs while you coping SAP BW systems or migrating. Also notice that you must not to transport number ranges values from one system to another; that might cause serious problems.

P.S. What’s your highest no of "Request ID"? :o)

Switching off SAP BW reports from production

First note that technique described in this post is not advisable to follow. Take it as a pure cheating of system and be aware that this activity might cause inconsistencies within your BW queries. Anyway sometimes it is necessary to do not allow users to access reports. Of course normal way would be that you lock users in SAP system in order to prevent them to log to system. This can be done via basis transaction. In case you running BW as global system with some other SAP solution running in same system even in different clients (like ECC+BW+SCM+PLM… etc) you cannot effort to do this. Therefore I tried to play with BW stuff in order to switch off reports from production.
There are 2 changes that you need to make:

Table RSZCOMPDIR contains directory of all report’s components and it has field OBJSTAT (referring to domain RSOBJSTAT) describing status of query or component of query. It can have following values:

ACT    Active, executable
INA    Inactive, not executable
OFF    Switched off
PRO    Productive

Once you change value of this field from ACT to INA value you achieve that report will NOT be run able anymore.

Table RSRREPDIR contains directory of reports and it has field same OBJSTAT (referring to same domain) describing status of query or component of query.

Once you change value of these 2 fields from ACT to INA value for Active version of objects (OBJVERS = ‘A’) you achieve that report will NOT be run able anymore. E.g. BEx Analyzer shows your report while you try to search it but if you attempt to run it you receive message:

Query cannot be generated here. Correct it in Query Designer. R9E 977
Query definition D5OLML1YXH9DEMU34HWGJ0XX0 could not be read. BRAIN  252D..
Query ZMM_Q03_3X_VERSION could not be opened. BRAIN 635
>> Row: 37 Inc: CONSTRUCTOR Prog:CL_RSR_OLAP_VAR RS_EXCEPTION 301CL_RSR_OLAP_VAR

You can write some small and handy ABAP routine to do this in batch mode for a range of reports.

SAP + BO joined portfolio

As it is been quite time since SAP’s acquisition of BO a set of BI products is quite range. According BI platform roadmap some of products will be divested out by some new ones that will replace them, some are redundant, etc. but still there is a large set of tools and it is quite confusing. Below I’m providing a matrix of almost all products available. Notice that list is not inclusive since it is almost not possible to capture all SAP + BO product in comprehensive manner.

Origin	Area	Product family	Tools
BO	(Advanced) Analytics	SAP BusinessObjects XI	Voyager, Predictive Workbench, Set Analysis
BO	Dashboards and visualization		Xcelsius Suite, Dashboard Builder, VizServer
BO	Information infrastructure	SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise
BO	Query, reporting and analyses	SAP BusinessObjects Desktop Intelligence, SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence
BO	Reporting	Crystal Reports	Crystal Reports Developer Advantage, Crystal Reports Server, Crystal Reports Viewer, crystalreports.com
SAP		SAP BEx Suite
BO	Search and navigation	SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, SAP BusinessObjects Intelligent Search
BO	Data integration	SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator, SAP BusinessObjects Data Federator, SAP BusinessObjects Rapid Marts packages, SAP BusinessObjects Text Analysis
BO	Data quality management		SAP BusinessObjects Data Quality Management software, SAP BusinessObjects Universal Data Cleanse software, SAP BusinessObjects Data Quality Management for SAP solutions, SAP BusinessObjects Data Quality Management for Oracle's Siebel CRM, SAP BusinessObjects Data Insight software, SAP BusinessObjects Postalsoft software solutions, SAP BusinessObjects Watchlist Security software
BO	Data services		SAP BusinessObjects Data Services
SAP	Master data management		SAP NetWeaver MDM
BO	Metadata management		SAP BusinessObjects Metadata Management
BO	Planning and Consolidation	SAP BusinessObjects Edge Planning and Consolidation	SAP BusinessObjects Cartesis Finance
BO	Strategy Management	SAP Businessobjects Edge Strategy Management

Key products/technologies:

SAP BEx Suite - provides reporting/analysis/planning tools for analyses and decision-making support of business.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer (former name: Polestar) - tool primary for business users with a simple, quick search based access to data.

BO Crystal Reports (CR) - industry standard tool for enterprise reporting.

BO Web Intelligence (WebI) - tool for web-based ad-hoc query and reporting. Focus on creation of light-weight reports in ad-hoc web reporting.

BO Dashboard Builder - is content layout tool (page building) for creating composite dashboards.

BO Crystal Xcelsius - visual content creation tool for creation single/standalone dashboards for the desktop or portal page.

BO InfoView - end-user BI portal interface, a single web interface that accesses and interacts with BI information (reports, analytics, dashboards, scorecards, maps...).
BO Voyager - OLAP tool designed for financial/business analyses on a full range of functions to analyze multi-dimensional data.

BO Mobile XI - creating BI app. for mobile devices.

BO LiveOffice - deployment and access of BI reports & dashboards from Microsoft Office applications.

SAP NW CE (NetWeaver Composition Environment) - platform for building composite applications (app that creates new functionality by leveraging existing services of another app, so called mash-up) based on SOA principles.

SAP/BO BI widgets - are a mini-application that allows access to frequently used functions and provides visual information right from the desktop. Can be developed in e.g. SAP Visual Composer, BO on AIR, etc.

BO Predictive Workbench - predictive analytic tool. Reveals trends and patterns to understand business changes.

BO Set Analysis - define, track, and analyze segments that drive business activities.

Future tools:

BO Pioneer - future tool will combine Voyager's user interface with OLAP capabilities of today's BEx OLAP tools.

BO Explorer - brings together search and navigation capabilities from BO with the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator to dig into large data sets in a matter of seconds. Tool was announced on May 2009 during Sapphire 2009 in Orlando. The product will be available this summer.

You can find free SAP BO products directory here.

Creating reports based on SAP BW InfoProviders in BO Crystal Reports

As probably many of you I have approached BO tools in order to obtain basic feeling about it since especially reporting tools are going to replace our famous BEx tool as depicted in BI roadmap published by SAP. In this post I’m focused on pure reporting part of BO which is represented by tool called Crystal Reports (CR) 2008. Crystal Reports is software originally created about year 1990 by company called Crystal Services which was bought by Seagate Technology in 1994. Seagate renamed its software unit at that time as Crystal Decisions which was attained by Business Objects (BO) in 2003; finally BO was taken over by SAP in 2008. Since that time BO stood as an industry standard in category of reporting software as it is bundled with several major development tools.

Let’s start with software that I used. A reporting tool as it self I downloaded as a copy of 30 day evaluation version from official SAP.com pages. Then I needed a tool called BusinessObjects Integration Kit for SAP - Crystal Reports 2008 which is downloadable from SDN.

Crystal reports are to be created out of Crystal Reports 2008 but you need to have an info provider out of BW that is supplying data for “Crystal Reports” based report.  In my case I used normal BW query created in BW by BEx. BW query is created prior to use to create report in Crystal Reports. You have to enable your query to allow external access to query. You set this as a check box on query properties in BEx Query Designer.

 

1. Open CR 2008, there is a Crystal Reports toolbar specific to BW. 

  

2. Create a blank report via menu File-> New-> Blank Report -> BW system connected to CR is displayed and all queries from BW system are listed, pick up your BW query which will be served as base query fro your CR query:

 

3. Follow wizard in order to select fields that you want to display in CR query and other settings for CR query.

4. Adjust layout and other settings of your CR query in CR 2008. Data is automatically refreshed with data taken from BW server any time you open CR2008 tool.

Query output in BEx Analyzer:

  

Query output in CR2008:

SAP IDES and its notebook

SAP was providing such a handy tool for customers and partners with a valid SAP license based on their agreement with their partnering organization. It is really notebook where you have everything installed and prepared to be used. It has its roots in SAP offering called IDES (International Demonstration and Education System). It started with R/3 only; a years ago where SAP is providing its software already preconfigured and filled up by data. Usually it comes with quite high level of installed Support Packs for particular version. In IDES you get complete installation and customizing of Model Company plus its data. The SAP model company is usually in client 800 of IDES/Training system. Only restriction is that such a system must not be used as productive one.

After providing of IDES R/3 SAP added some more software solution out of IDES set, like CRM, SCM, SRM and some Industry Solutions. BW is included in IDES as well. Currently BW is shipped with 2 versions:

• BW 7.0 / SEM 6.0 - as a part of an integrated IDES demo landscape consists of several IDES mySAP Business Suite components: ECC 6.0, SRM 5.0, CRM 5.0, SCM 5.0; see note 1013702 - IDES BW 7.0 /SEM 6.0
• BW 3.5/SEM 4.0 Vers.2

Now back to SAP notebook topic. Regarding availability of IDES Notebook it was limited recently. Since most likely agreement with partnering organization has expired. At the moment there is no information when it became available again. Watch put note 1314166 - IDES notebook regularly to get updates.

Future development tool for SAP BI

Developing of SAP BI applications (like reports, queries, applications (web/dashboards/cockpits/planning/analytics apps), web templates, web items, etc.) are quite spread across several tools. The fact that BI has a multiple flavours and this is basic reason of that. With acquisition of Business Objects started 2 years ago a set of tools is even larger. So let’s have a closer look what we got here. From the beginning of SAP BW there is a tool called Business Explorer (BEx). Basically in era up to BW 3.x there were 3 positions of BEx: 

• BEx Query Designer – for reports developing
• BEx Analyzer - for running reports
• Web Application Designer (WAD) – for developing of objects suitable for web reporting

Some other minor BEx tools were there as well: 

• Browser – for accessing BW objects
• Formatted Reporting
• Download Scheduler

Below see how BW 3.x tools look like in installation of SAP GUI 7.1.

 

Since new generation of SAP BW introduced in version of 7.0 tool set was little bit integrated and within SAP NetWeaver 2004 a new tool came: Visual Composer BI Kit (VC). VC was already on market for some time before – as part of SAP Enterprise Portals. Here it was a design tool that facilitates the creation of portal content using a visual user interface w/o writing code. VC is mostly used in area of UI modeling based on model-driven architecture. VC is pursuing SAP’s SOA initiatives in terms of services-oriented composition of analytical applications and the embedding of information into tasks, processes, and applications. VC provides a web-based visual development environment based on Eclipse framework.

Below see how BW 7.x tools look like in installation of SAP GUI 7.1.

  

Notice that in under mentioned text I’m mentioning VC from BI point of view only.

Further development of VC focused on BI issued into tools called Visual Composer BI Kit (so called BI Extension Kit, VC BIk). Purpose of VC in that flavour is BI integration functionality that can access SAP/non-SAP data using an SAP BI connector (for SAP NetWeaver BI) and BI Java connectors (for OLAP and relational data). Apps built via VC BIk are different from applications build with WAD since those integrate any type of information (transactional, structured/unstructured). SAP BI provides platform for tools: WAD and VC BIk. WAD will remain for some time in landscape but it seems that SAP’s intention is to support more VC BIk plus other tools inherited from BOBJ – see BI Platform Roadmap. Other possibility is to reused objects developed in WAD into models built in VC BIk. Other functionalities like Information broadcasting, BI analytical and planning, is going to be available to build up in VC BIk as well. Moreover VC servers as a pattern designer tool too. VC is going to replace BEx. VC BIk supports a wizard based + freeform modeling of query templates. Following are the newest version of VC:

Visual Composer 6.0 – around year 2005

Visual Composer 7.0 – beginning of 2006

Visual Composer 7.1– around year 2007

To share some information how possible future “big tool of BI” might look like I would add following: VC may possible support not only offline creation of reports but also staging objects like BW transformations, or data providers objects (cubes, DSOs). You would really be able to create any object within BW data flow offline w/o connection to SAP BW backend and deploy it there afterwards when connection to BW is available.

For complete information on VC see: online docu and SDN. 

Rebranding of SAP BI products names

As of January 2009 SAP AG has rebranded portfolio of its BI products. SAP BW which was meanwhile called NetWeaver BI (the eldest name it had was BIW) is now officially called SAP NetWeaver BW (SAP NW BW). Some other products are affected by this change as well. BI Accelerator (BIA) has now new name BWA - Business Warehouse Accelerator. By this change SAP is returning back to one of earliest name - see Short history of BW. A Term NetWeaver BI was used less then three years approximately.

Now SAP NW BW mostly comprises of classical Data warehousing functionalities like: DW management, ETL, modeling, Business planning, reporting & analyses (query, web apps), Meta data management, monitoring, Hub and spoke services, Information broadcasting, BW Accelerator. It is not very clear but based on this recent name change we can assume that term BI is going to be used more in terms of former Business Objects products portfolio. See more information on official SAP pages.