File path configuration in BO Data Services

[Former Member]

In this article I shall be describing how to configure the BODS for file access so that multiple teams can work simultaneously.

In this particular situation there were 2 different projects/releases being developed simultaneously: REL1 and REL2. For each of these releases, there are 2 different teams were involved: the development team and the testing team. These projects have a number of tab delimited flat files as input. After cleansing, transformation and validation in BODS, the output is again written to flat files so that they can be loaded to SAP system by LSMW transaction codes. We need to maintain different paths for Input files and output files based on the release, and the usage (DEV or TEST).

This can be achieved by maintaining the separate paths to be used by the different teams in the BOBJ server and then maintain reference to these paths via the database. As is shown in the image below, we have created a table (TEST_BOBJ_PARAMETERS) which stores the file path configured in the BODS server in the columns OBJ_TEXT.  The columns RELEASE, CONVERSION and OBJ_NAME can be used as “key” to determine the required folder path.

Image for table TEST_BOBJ_PARAMETERS

For example, if I am part of the development team and I need to determine the input  and output folder paths for Release 1 then I shall be using the below key values:

For Input folder: RELEASE = REL1, CONVERSION=DEV, OBJ_NAME=INPUT_FOLDER

For Output folder: RELEASE = REL1, CONVERSION=DEV, OBJ_NAME=OUTPUT_FOLDER

In order to ensure uniform usage of these settings, the following global variables need to be created in every job:

A initializing script can then set the input and output folder paths dependent on the key values . This script will contain a sql query to the table TEST_BOBJ_PARAMETERS and will fetch the file path based on keys set in global variables.

In actual case it is sufficient to set the folders once only with the correct set of KET values. For demo purpose I have run the job after setting the KEY values for different combinations of RELEASE and CONVERSION.