BEx Query Designer: Usage of NODIM function in formulas

Data function in BW BEx Query Designer NODIM is used to remove unit or currencies from key figures. It is useful while you need to calculate over key figures with different units or currencies.

Unless you employ using the NODIM you will get messages like MIXED VALUES or similar depending on customizing (SPRO - > BW - > Reporting-relevant Settings - > General Reporting Settings - > Display of Numerical Values in the Business Explorer).

How you use the function within BEx Query Designer’s formulas?

If you put it like this:

It is not correct. While you run report you get message:

Element  is not correctly defined check the query definition

Diagnosis

Additional elements are added to the item Variance that do not have the same dimension, for example, quantities and amounts or amounts and ratios.

Procedure

If you the addition is still meaningful, you can hide the dimensionality of one or both partial outputs with the operator 'NODIM'. The system then understands this partial output as a dimensionless number.

Correct way of using NODIM function is:

HILO = SAPVisi = Photon = SAP Lumira

One of last week SAPphirenow (14-16 may 2013) outcomes was announcement of new name for SAP Visual Intelligence. From this time on the new name is SAP Lumira. Tool initially started as project HILO as new generation of data visualization software. Yep! Even after all tools acquired from BusinessObjects SAP indented to create a new tool. Just needed to say that project was driven within BusinessObjects portfolio particularly in what is BusinessObjects Explorer. HILO was Desktop Edition of BusinessObjects Explorer. Around spring of 2012 it was aimed to access, manipulate and match up data in order to create rich, beautiful and highly interactive data visualizations. 

Then moving to end of 2012 year a Visual Intelligence (in short SAPVisi) was chosen as new name. It was the data manipulation and visualization tool. Enables to connect various data sources, select and clean data, manipulate and visualize data with a diverse offer of graphical charts and tables. SAP Visual Intelligence can be installed locally and can operate on data either remotely or on locally stored datasets. The outputs (e.g. charts) created (in format .SViD) can be saved as files and sent out by email. File is a document that contains the data source connection information, the data definition and data, and the visualizations. Datasets can be published to SAP Hana, and documents published to SAP Streamwork activities, etc.

Early in 2013 a project "Photon" came in to the game. It represents SAP’s move to cloud analytics. There are some companies (e.g. gooddata) which came with this concept earlier. Cloud analytics is a service model in which elements of the data analytics process are provided through a public or private cloud. In broader terms cloud analytics can be service like hosted data warehouses, software-as-a-service business intelligence (SaaS BI known as on-demand BI or cloud BI) and cloud-based social media analytics. SaaS BI may involve delivery of BI apps to users from a hosted/cloud location. Photon is set to materialize SAPVisi in forms like self-service data visualization in the cloud. It remains to be part of SAP’s BI OnDemand.

Finally last week Photon got official name SAP Lumira. Lumira positioned as new innovation for self-service BI. Lumira comes on two flavors, as:

SAP Lumira – Desktop app

SAP Lumira Cloud – Cloud app

BTW: SAP BusinessObjects Explorer stays stand-alone as Lumira and Explorer are complementary and integrated. SAP Lumira allows Analysts to load, mash-up and manipulate data and then share their results back into SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for distribution over the web and onto mobile devices. See FAQs.

Download links:

Commercial versions (Standard/Personal) of Lumira or here

30 days trail version of Lumira

Try cloud version

Useful links:

SCN space

SAP Lumira Gallery

Product_Guide

Getting started with Lumira

sap.com/datavisualization

ABAP Statement IF FOUND

There is an interesting addition to some of ABAP statements which is suppressing ABAP dump (Runtime Error: LOAD_PROGRAM_NOT_FOUND, Except: CX_SY_PROGRAM_NOT_FOUND) introduced. It came with NetWeaver ABAP AS release 6.40. It is used to in case when specified include program does not exist normally a syntax error will be triggered. Syntax error message can be suppressed by specifying the addition IF FOUND. Usage e.g.:

INCLUDE ZMM001 FOUND.

PERFORM function(zmm_formpool_1) IF FOUND.

In BW area IF FOUND can be used as well. E.g. If you have your business logic for BW transformation in include ABAP program. You can call include the include ABAP report with the if found addition.

Python and SAP?

Python is extremely popular in areas of string manipulation and search in a dictionary. This makes this programing language preferred option by programmers for writing scripting applications. As part of these areas of usage and others; python is used in SAP arena as well.

1/ First time I encounter python in SAP was earlier in 2007 when I start to work with BI Accelerator. Here there is an accelerator admin console written in python. It is using script TREXAdmin.py to start it up - Python Admintool or so called TREX Administration Tool (Python). The tool as itself is used to administrate queues of the TREX queue server and indexes of the TREX index server. It is possible to monitor availability and functions of the TREX. The tool was written in python to be used regardless of the operating system on which TREX was installed. Also as it is stand-alone tool it can be used to monitor TREX during routine operation independently of the application using the TREX.

Speaking of BI Accelerator (later renamed to BWA) there is a bunch of other tools written in python as well. E.g.:

• importManager.py / exportManager.py – backup/restore  TREX index and queue files
• RfcServerTrace4SAP.py - Python Trace
• alertserver.py - TREXAlertserver
• topoview.py – TREX topology
• etc.

2/ Another big SAP field where python language is used in SAP MaxDB. There are MaxDB python modules to access SAP MaxDB databases from python scripts. Scope of modules covers executing SQL statements, managing databases, importing and exporting data.

3/ ABAP connectivity. Python us used in several areas e.g. in web applications development, RESTful hardware integration and ABAP extensions while speaking of accessing SAP backaend. As for ABAP based (ABAP stack) backend there must be Python RFC connectors which enable that connectivity. Apart of others SAP is providing Python RFC Connector for that as well. Here’s official pages.

4/ Last but not least there is also SAP HANA relying on the python.

Few examples of how Python is used in HANA:

1659599 - SAP HANA: Pythontrace for TREX-ABAP interfaces

1817038 - HANA/TREX: TREX_ABAP_CUSTOMIZING on HANA

report HANA_ABAP_PYTHON - to switch on ABAP-Python trace

report TREX_ABAP_CUSTOMIZING - Customizing for the TREX ABAP Client, Customizing indexing and search you can choose between the communication methods ICM or TCM. ICM is the default. TCM is slightly faster than ICM and does not do any implicit commits, but can only be chosen if the MaxDB client is installed. (TCM as formerly known as DBSL).

There are some python related blogs available on SCN:

Python-abap

Tasting the mix of python and sap

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC)

Here’s short recap for those of you who didn’t notice yesterday’s rush on e.g. twitter regarding SAP’s announcement. If you are twitter familiar you can look up a hash tag #simplyHANA as event was covered by that tag. 

Basically what was said is that SAP is moving its HANA solution more and further into the cloud. So called SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) was announced. It is another SAP’s cloud initiative (SAP HANA One – developer or business editions, just to mention very few related to the HANA). This is about HANA going on large scale. SAP believes that in future even companies with mission critical systems (e.g. from banking, pharma industries) will put their applications, infrastructures and all platforms into the cloud. Given this SAP is offering possibility to run customer’s apps on top of a cloud-based version of HANA in-memory DB technology. Basically this is an essence what was the event about. They emphasizing that they could run also big apps like data warehouses (SAP BW), CRM, ERPs apps. There was short demo of app called Cloud Frame Monitor. The app enables to configure and deploy HANA instances over the cloud. Like customer can configure, dynamically add more power (more CPUs, nodes) and storage to the running app as needed. 

From licensing point of view it was said that customer needs to have HANA license as well as app license (BW, CRM, ERP, ...). They app is deployed into SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud which will use most likely subscription pricing model.

See all of Vishal Sikka’s thoughts of the announcement here.

To me personally I’m even more confused what I heard at event. It looks like potentially SAP would run their (own?) data centers with offering of having customer’s apps running in those so called SAP’s clouds. This is very new to current status as SAP is relaying on partner (amazon’s AWS, cloudshare, ucloud, etc.) cloud to run SAP’s apps. Would SAP invest into the data centers? Maybe they gained some while acquisitions of ariba and successfactors?  

Let's see if next week's Sapphire conference in Orlando will give more clarify about SAP HEC.

For event’s whole reply look here.

Operational Data Provisioning (ODP)

You may encounter this topic while speaking of datasource which are or are not released for ODP. The release it self means either they are enabled to be used by tools like SAP Data Services (former SAP BusinessObjects Data Services (BODS)) (DS). ODP Data Replication API is used for internal connection of Data Services to application extractors. Interface is delivered with a NetWeaver Support Package. SP is specific for each of ECC’s component PI_BASIS.

Great benefit of ODP is that so far only BW could use business content datasources. While utilizing ODP all Business Suite extractor can be consumed without BW. Also there is no need for ABAP flows where data provided by extractor is processed while staging. This clearly indicates that one of data consumer is SAP HANA.

How to recognize if particular DS is released for ODP? Check table ROOSATTR. If the datasource (extractor) is marked as released in ROOSATTR (field EXPOSE_EXTERNAL = X), then ODP API will be used for extraction and multiple subscriptions should be possible.  If it is not marked as released in ROOSATTR, then you are not using ODP to do extractions and multiple subscriptions are not possible.

If you have developed your custom extractors and you would like to released them in this way you need to use ABAP report RODPS_OS_EXPOSE for that.

P.S: be careful while you upgrading your ECC via SP or EHP. It may happen that upgrade will release some of business content datasources as ODP. As consequence some of them may stop working. Therefore always check SMP for the latest fixes of such a issues.

More info on ODP topic:

1558737 - Data Sources released for ODP data replication API

Releasing Extractors for use by the ODP API

EIM Data Sources

1585204 - ETL interface: Release of DataSources

For other option DXC (Direct Extractor Connection) complement to ODP see here

Changes to ABAP workbench TAs

I just observed that also ABAP Workbench is going through few some changes. So it is not only HANA which is main focus at SAP :-)

SAP_ABA 730 08:

SAP_ABA 731 05:

There is no Status any more:

Main program is now called Master Program and few less flags:

SAP BusinessObjects Mobile client

As of mid of March 2013 there is a SAP BusinessObjects Mobile client available for download. Basically following two major mobile platforms are supported:

·         android – android OS based mobile phones or tablets

·         iOS – apple’s: iphone, ipads

·         Windows Mobile – based phones and tablets

·         Blackberry – based phones and tablets

·         Symbian – based phones

Mobile clients are applications for the mobile device that needs to be downloaded to each mobile device. The clients are providing an access to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) documents from mobile devices. By BI documents are meant as such: Web Intelligence documents and Crystal report documents.

Current version of SAP BusinessObjects Mobile is 4.2.4.

To be able to use Mobile client application you need to deploy SAP BusinessObjects Mobile server. The server part is basically Web application server. It performs receiving of the requests sent by mobile client and passing them to the SAP  BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) platform server. Also receiving the response (e.g. Web Intelligence or Crystal Report report’s output data) from the BI platform server and sending it back to the SAP BusinessObjects Mobile client.

See further materials or what do you need to know while developing SAP BOBJ mobile apps:

help.sap.com/bomobile

help.sap.com/bomobileandroid

help.sap.com/bomobileios

1822390 - SAP BusinessObjects Mobile v4.2.4 client application for Android OS

1708298 - SAP BusinessObjects Mobile for Android User Guide

1719444 - SAP BusinessObjects Mobile for Android Release Notes

1708019 - SAP BusinessObjects Mobile Android 4.0.5 Security Guide

1696770 - SAP BusinessObjects Mobile (for iOS, Android) Security Guide

SAP BusinessObjects Mobile – download app for android

Apps by SAP AG – other android apps by SAP AG

Browser's support by SAP

As BW consultant you may wonder sometimes what web browser are supported in BW/BI area. As web access is used also in other SAP solutions we can extent the topic of browser support to functionalities witch utilize different User Interface (UI) technologies. Over the time SAP has developed a many of UI technologies. Just to mention a few:

·         Web Dynpro ABAP (BC-WD-ABA)

·         Web Dynpro Java (BC-WD-JAV)

·         SAP GUI for HTML (integrated ITS)

·         NetWeaver Business Client (NWBC) for HTML

·         Enterprise Portal End Users (Portal rendering and HTMLB for Java) or SAP NetWeaver Portal

·         Portal Administrator

·         BSP (Business Server Pages, incl. HTMLB for ABAP Design 2003 and 2008), BSP Extensions

·         SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe (SAP IFbA)

·         BI (BEx Web and BI Java)

·         Visual Composer Runtime (Desktop/Mobile)

·         Visual Composer Designtime

·         SAPUI5 , SAPUI Services

·         ICF System logon (BC-MID-ICF-LGN)

There are a tons of functionalities spread across different SAP solution which are even completely designed to be accessed via web. Therefore the browser support is very important.

In general currently SAP supports following browsers, always see particular SAP Note with the latest information about the browser. 

1/ Internet Explorer

1672817 - Internet Explorer for end users and administrators

1599159 – IE9 Release Note for Administrators

1583947 – Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Release Notes

2/ Mozilla Firefox

990034 - Firefox browser for end users and administrators

3/ Apple Safari

1634749 - Safari browser for end user and administrators

1446519 – Safari Restrictions for Unified Rendering and ACF

4/ Google Chrome

1655306 - Google Chrome for end users and administrators

Opera – is not currently supported by SAP applications. Only way how Opera is supported is that you can use it to browser SAP’s Service Marketplace (SMP). 

Detailed information about supported web browser (browser running on operating system versions) is available in the Product Availibility Matrix (PAM) on SAP’s Service Marketplace (SMP). Apart of PAM also check following main SAP Notes related to browsers:

1728946 - Central Browser Note for NetWeaver

1566444 - Main Browser Note for BS7i2010

1574357 - Main Browser Note for BS7i2011

1296419 - Main Browser Note for NW 2004

1296463 - Main Browser Note for NW 7.0

1296464 - Main Browser Note for NW 7.1

1509421 - Main Browser Note for NW 7.3

1793938 - Main Browser Note for NetWeaver 7.4

1403485 - Browser Support: Windows 7

More important SAP Notes for SAP BW:

1029680 - BEx Web applications Java: Limitations for Firefox

494689 - Web Browser compatibility of BW 3.0A and higher

321973 - Recommendations for the BW front end

338532 - BW 2.0B and 2.1C Web browser compatibility

More important SAP Notes per UI technology:

598860 - Browsers supported by BSP

1705067 - Known issues for Portal on Device

1716423 - SAPUI5 Browser Support for Mobile and Desktop Applications

Deactivating SAP functionality - hierarchical pricing

There might several reasons occur why customer and SAP would want to deactivate certain functionality provided with the software. From customer perspective: if there is more than one version of same functionality (e.g. old feature being replaced by new version of same thing) customer may want to employ new version of the thing and switch off the old one. In that case there are some customizing parameters provided (e.g. in form of tables, system profile parameters etc.) by SAP to support that kind of switch. Basically in this case it is up to the customer free will which version of the same functionality want to use.

However there might be cases that SAP wants to customer pursue to disable certain functionality. This is especially in case of patent infringement. Other organizations of individuals may claim ownership of ideas/algorithms etc. used in software. That would be typical case why software vendor would do that. Recently this happened for SAP’s solution like R/3, Enterprise, ECC, CRM, SRM, GTS.  They all are using so called hierarchical access feature in pricing and pricing-related functionality build into above listed solutions. There was a court trial being held between company Versata and SAP in the matter of hierarchical access feature. As the trail has been settled so far US customer of SAP are obligated to deactivate to this functionality. Herewith SAP is providing SAP Notes which automates deactivation of the functionality.

I’m not judging who is right or wrong in this case. However it is not beneficial for customer of both parties. As per this example it is obvious how monstrous, chaotic and messy are patents proceedings are and how time consuming it takes to settle it down.

For more information review following SAP Notes:

1600482 - Hierarchical access functionality (seems to be main note)

1645516 - Deactivation of hierarchical access functionality

1645515 - Deactivation of hierarchical access functionality

1643194 - Deactivation of hierarchical access functionality

1600091 - Deactivation of hierarchical access functionality        

1599403 - Deactivation of hierarchical access functionality

Retraction of data from BW to ECC CO-PA

Retraction is usually provisioning of data stored in BW system into its source systems. In general Retractor is functionality that transfers the data from the BW) back to a source system. By this we providing data already transformed and aggregated in some way back to the source system. Retractors are heavily used in ECC’s CO-PA (Controlling Profitability Analysis) module. Here actual data previously extracted to BW systems is used as reference data for generating new planning data in CO-PA module. E.g. retractor is used to transfer this planning data back to the source system as target values for the planning periods. Both type if data transfer is possible: PUSH – extraction triggered in BW and PULL extraction triggered in ECC.

Examples of other retractor applications: from BPS to PP module, BPC to CO-PA,..

How to prepare such a CO-PA extractor?

First we need to prepare BW query which will provide the data. Basically retractor in ECC will call this query and data from the query will be stored in ECC. Secondly we need to perform customizing in ECC. By customizing a mapping is meant between characteristics and key figures in query to fields (so called characteristics and value fields in CO-PA). The customizing is done in KELC transaction. 

How to perform retraction in ECC?

We use KELR transaction. This is PULL extraction. Here on selection screen we specify name for particular transfer of data. As well as RFC connection to BW system and technical name of BW query. Also we need to specify type of data (actual, plan etc.). Then we run it. Log (TA KELU) and other functionality (Cancel: TA KELS) is available as well.

For details refer to:

How to… CO-PA Retraction

540278 - Retractor: Changes to BW system after Customizing transport

Funny notes: No solution

By accident I came across one note today. The note is dealing with information for users how to proceed with coping of BW objects between different table spaces. 

Note 771191 - Copying BW objects to new tablespaces

Actually solution part of the note is quite funny. Is says:

(Consulting => Not a problem scenario => No solution)

Which reminds me of famous anonymous quote: no job, no money no problem :-)

Tracking improvements of help.sap.com

Some time ago I posted a blog about new design of help.sap.com. Well the design is not the only thing that was changed. Basically whole site was revamp with a lot of cool features. Here short list of them:

• navigation history by so called “pills”
• Printing/downloading documentation to PDF
• Mobile device support
• Full screen mode
• URL shortcuts e.g. /erp605 /erp606
• Web 2.0 features: feedback to pages, twitter integration, SCN integration
• Search engine changes: federated search at help.sap.com/search with possibilities like restricting search on Solution type, Version, etc; filtering by metadata; consolidation of identical search results (Show this topic in other releases)
• Multi language Display

I really like those changes, with them SAP is catching the latest trends in web and they really brings value for me as user of help portal.

To see whole story of features refer to following blog SAP Help Portal transformation series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Background on SAP Help Portal platform landscape and development process.

Tool Z_DOCU_CREATE_FROM_FILE

I recently came across few SAP BW notes on SMP like:

1683554        SAPI tasks for System Copy Automation   

1703068        System copy with archive

1632574        BW tasks for System Copy Automation

and I found ABAP tool called Z_DOCU_CREATE_FROM_FILE mentioned in these SAP Notes. The tool is used for automating ABAP’s messages creation while deploying Notes. Usage is of the tool very easy. As first you need to create ABAP report Z_DOCU_CREATE_FROM_FILE as itself. The source of the report is attached in those above mentioned Notes. Input parameter is transport request into which those ABAP messages will be stored into. Another input parameter is XML file attached in the Notes. The XML file has actually all the definitions of ABAP messages. 

Based on the XML file the will automatically create ABAP messages that are needed for particular notes.

Notice that to deploy messages further you need only to transport request where you stored he messages. The report Z_DOCU_CREATE_FROM_FILE doesn’t need to be transported to further systems in your landscape.

Notice that this tool is not similar to the open source SAP LINK which is full blown tool for sharing of ABAP codes. The Z_DOCU_CREATE_FROM_FILE tool at least in current stage (April 2013) supports just ABAP messages. See my blog post about SAP LINK.

Of course it is not similar to transaction SNOTE which deploys code correction contained in official SAP Notes.