Building your own Embedded Analytics application – part 3.

In my previous blog I talked about enabling Crystal Reports as an alternative to display ALV lists. Now it’s time to talk about other, standard ways of displaying “results”. Let’s see for example what’s available for Sales and Distribution.

IMPORTANT UPDATE (September 23rd, 2014):

If you consider “experimenting” with this, please do so in a Sandbox first. The switch framework has a couple of restrictions (transport = all or nothing; some business functions cannot be “undone”, …). Also, if you upgraded to ECC 6 EHP6, please do check OSS notes on switch framework as an important OSS note (see 1808606 for a description) may be missing and will (possibly) cause problems down the road…

As a first step, we’ll need to activate certain “business functions”. We do so via transaction SFW5:

The above screenshot is a little “simplification” as I only show what’s necessary to activate. In reality you’ll need to scroll down to the Folder ENTERPRISE_BUSINESS_FUNCTIONS first and then to the LOG_SD_ANALYTICS_01 entry.

In the Planned Status column you’ll see an empty checkbox (if the function is not activated yet – in our system it has been activated so it shows “Business func. will remain activated” instead). To activate this business function check this box, and then hit the “Activate Changes” button on top of the screen.

In a second step we have to activate the actual BI content. This can be done via transaction BSANLY_BI_ACTIVATION:

(if necessary) change the Business Category to “03 Business Functions”. Then select LOG_SD_ANALYTICS_01 and hiet “Activate…”. If you’re lucky, you won’t get the following screen:

We’ve got all sorts of errors here… first, we had “issues” with our shared object memory being too short?!

with accompanying short dumps

Initially, we “cleared” a couple of those shared object memory objects via transaction SHMM, but eventually we’ve changed the “abap/shared_objects_size_MB” parameter from 20 to 40MB (in transaction RZ11):

Secondly, we received messages about non-existing InfoProviders:

A bit strange as this is exactly what this transaction is supposed to install, right?!

Via some SCN posts we found that one can install a single ODP (Operational Data Provider) via ABAP program RODPS_LOAD_ACTIVATE_SINGLE. So, let’s do this for 0OPS_11_ITM.

We repeated this for the other ODPs throwing errors and afterwards our log looked like this:

The TREX error can be ignored. The errors regarding the Dashboards can be solved by running this transaction (BSANLY_BI_ACTIVATION) again but for Business Category “99 Ohters”:

We’re still missing the role SAP_QAP_BW_DASHBOARDS which is mentioned in the SAP help. We opened an incident at SAP for this and received an answer stating that the role was never intended to be delivered?! A work around is available via OSS 2001264.

So, let’s see what this “brings” us… assuming we only have the relevant roles for (Embedded Analytics for) Sales and Distribution (or at least no other role with “Hide Menu from NWBC” unchecked) you’ll see this:

The only relevant entry for now is the “Search and Analytics” one (the rest refers to POWLs which we’re not using… yet). So, let’s click on it

As you can see from the top of the screen this is merely a “launchpad” which is controlled via transaction LPD_CUST. Scroll down to Role = ISR, Instance = REP to see the customizing behind the above screen.

Let’s say we would like to see “Top 10 customers (based on incoming orders)”:

In order to be able to display this, you need to “change” the settings in the launchpad. If you “follow” the documentation, you should call your embedded BI server “SAP_BI”, however in the launchpad you see this:

click on the “Show Advanced (Optional) Parameters”

by default this “Target App. Parameters” was set to: SYSTEM=SAP_BI_ECC_SALES&VARIABLE_SCREEN=X which will result in error messages if you called your system SAP_BI as per the documentation.

I’ll try to add more details on this SAP_BI system soon… one important thing I forgot to mention is that in order to get the above to work, you need your ECC system (in which you wish to use this Embedded Analytics scenario) linked to a Portal (which wasn’t the case for us).

EXTREMELY UNDESIRABLE SIDE EFFECT:

We just discovered a very undesirable side effect of installing these business functions. They do install “enhanced” DataSources… in this case a new version of 2LIS_11_VAHDR gets installed (amongst others) which includes NETWR as a standard field. We needed this field for our “normal” BW reporting so someone in the team transported the DataSource to QAS (while none of these Embedded Analytics transports were done yet – still in “development” phase) which didn’t work. We actually can’t seem to get the same version into QAS. Tables ROOSFIELD & TMCEXCFS are completely different too.

After a while I decided to look back at the activation of these business functions and double check the documentation (available via “I” icons in the customizing transaction) and found the following:

These business functions cannot be reversed either, so we don’t have any other option than to transport all of this. Unfortunately, that transport request seems to contain quite some DataSources (88 to be exact – 6 of which are LBWE) which we now have to double/triple/quadruple check 😡 ànd we need to take extreme caution with the 6 LBWE DataSources which are active in PRD.