BusinessObjects and SAP Part 7 – OLAP Universe change management

I hope you followed my blog series so far. If so by then you should be able to create Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence content on top of SAP NetWeaver BI and SAP ERP.

This time I will focus on very important features of our BusinessObjects XI Release 3.0 for Web Intelligence, which is Change Management for OLAP Universe.

In the Universe Designer in the menu “View” you will now find the item “Refresh Structure” which allows you to update the OLAP Universe based on changes – to take an example – in the BI Query.

The following is a concrete example:

I created a BI Query which contains two characteristics and some keyfigures:

In the next step I created a new universe on top of this BI query:

To show the change management functionality I now change the BI query by 

–          removing the characteristic Customer

–          Adding the characteristic Distribution Channel

–          Adding a variable for characteristic Product

And I change the keyfigure “Net Sales” in the Universe to have the description “Net Sales Revenue”.

I now go to the menu View > Refresh Structure in the Universe Designer:

• The “Keep” options are used when users want to keep the manually made Universe modifications like I did by changing the description of the keyfigure Net Sales
• The “Delete obsolete objects” option will remove items from the Universe that are no longer valid based on the data source.
• The “Hide obsolete objects” option will hide items that are no longer valid. In addition, these items will be configured with the prefix /##/.

Based on the changes I did to the BI query the Update wizard shows the summary of the changes that will be done to the universe.

In addition the customization of the name for the keyfigure Net Sales has not been changed back based on the choices we made when starting the update wizard.

So the universe has been update in the following way:

o   The class customer and all related objects are hidden and the prefix “##” was added

o   The class Distribution channel has been created with all related objects for the characteristic

o   The variable has been added as a filter

o   All customization have not been changed

There is a setting in the connection dialog that plays an important role during this workflow:

The setting for the Connection Pool Mode allows you to configure the underlying connection for the universe. In the case where this setting is – as an example – set to 10 min you might experience a behavior where the update wizard is not receiving all changes you did to the BI query when doing the steps directly after each other.  

This is because the OLAP BAPI interface builds a metadata cache on the client side every time a connection to BW is established. This cache is only emptied when the connection closes.

When working in parallel editing SAP BW Queries and mapping new universes to these queries, it is recommended that you close Designer (so that universe connections are also closed and the metadata cache is emptied) before building any new universes to take into account changes that were just made on the SAP BW Query side

By using the universe designer in combination with the update wizard you are able to build OLAP Universe, customize them based and your needs and requirements plus keep them up-to-date in a very simple way.

I hope this gave you a quick introduction to the update wizard for OLAP Universe and I would like to hear from everyone which topics are of most interest around BusinessObjects with SAP so that we can share the knowledge in this great community.