BI 4.1 – Design-time query not available (WIS 00000) Error with some BEx queries

Hey Webi World.

I have been seeing a number of customers reporting the below error after upgrading to BI 4.1 so I wanted to release a few details to help those that experience this issue.

First of all, I want to say that it is quite early on in the investigation and it appears that there could be a few different causes for this high level error from Webi.  This post is more a heads up on the known resolutions and a simple work-around that can be implemented for users that are getting this error on critical reports.

A little background on what Design Time Service is can be read in John Mrozek ‘s great SCN blog post here: BI 4.1 on BW 7x Performance Improvements 

In short, the design time service allows the BICs connector to retrieve metadata about BEx query definition quicker. 

In BI 4.0, we didn’t use the Design Time (DT) service so certain workflows we’re slightly slower, but they worked pretty reliably.  In BI 4.1, we are finding that if a failure occurs in the DT function, then the end user is presented with an error and may not be able to continue.

So, if you do see this issue, I would follow the below steps to resolve it:

1. Read John’s Blog post above and ensure that your BW system is patched up to the minimum or recommended levels.
   • BW 7.30 SP8 or BW 7.31 SP5+, plus all the SAP notes listed in his blog post OR
   • BW 7.30 SP10, 7.31 SP08 and 7.40 SP05 (versions that contain those notes)
     
2. Read KBA –  1940100 – Error “Design-time query not available (WIS 00000)” using BICS connectivity with WebI in BI 4.1 to find out what other options you might have.  This KBA will be updated as new resolutions/issues are discovered
   
3. Do an End to End trace by following Toby Johnston ‘s KBA: 1861180 – Customer instructions and best practice for collecting a BI Platform 4.x end to end trace 
   • Review the traces and find out what the cause of the failure is.  The error reported by Web Intelligence is a high level message and does not contain the details needed to actually identify the root cause.  You will want to look for an exception within the APS DSL Bridge logs that contains the stack trace from the BICs/JCO driver.
     
4. Contact support and provide the traces. 😉

Hope this helps!

– Jb