Second Look at BEx/BW with Lumira 1.17
First, SAP’s Antoine Chabert posted this in a blog comment:
“Connect to SAP Business Warehouse
i) When acquiring data from a SAP Business Warehouse system, only Visualize tab is available. Prepare, Compose, Predict and Share tab features are not available.
ii) SSO Support in 64bit is restricted to SAP Secure Login Client SSO
Release restrictions are also available from our help page SAP Lumira – SAP Help Portal Page:
http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/vi01/en/lum_117_restr_en.pdf
Second, I am seeing a lot of comments about not being able to see the BW system when connecting to Lumira Desktop 1.17. This is a “guess” on my part but perhaps the BW system is not listed in the SAPLOGON.INI which is usually on the users’ local drive. My SAPLOGON.INI file is populated because that is required if you are connecting to ERP/BW systems using Crystal Reports 2013.
Lumira 1.17 connects to the BW InfoProvider:
But you see of course that the InfoProvider only brings back aggregates. Your first choice should be connecting to the BEx query. Where would connecting to the BW InfoProvider be useful? Maybe with the new numbers only visualization? See below:
You can see Lumira will support the date ranges from the BEx query below:
Why connect to the BEX Query?
You want to connect to the BEx Query because it provides support for your BEx query’s calculated key figures as shown above (Balance is a calculation of budget minus actuals)
Also see how Lumira supports hierarchical prompts from the BEx query:
The latest download can be obtained from SAP Lumira (64 bit)
Thanks Tammy!
I am hoping to figure out why I cannot get it to connect. Can see our BW landscape, but get an error when trying to connect. So far as I can tell we meet the backend requirements..maybe a 64bit Lumira to 32 bit 7.30GUI.. will have to open a ticket.
thanks again!
jim
Hi James
Are you using SSO or manual authentication to BW?
I have tried both. I have the editable GUI LOGON PAD... both throw an error on logging in. UNKNOWN ERROR.
Ok I am not an expert and the experts are out of office. If you have time, can you please try following SSO logon a try (this is 64-bit).
win64sso.zip.
location, note the full path to the extracted file gx64krb5.dll
to the full path of the extracted gx64krb5.dll
(eg. SNC_LIB_64=c:\ssolibs\win64sso\ gx64krb5.dll). Set
it by going to Run -> SystemPropertiesAdvanced.exe, then click “Environment
Variables”.
If all goes as planned, SSO from 64-bit Lumira should then work.
So we have to be on 64bit GUI? If so, this is the reason. I believe we are on 32bit 7.30 GUI
jim
Hi James
No need to find 64 bit SAP GUI. 32 bit 7.30 SAP GUI should work with both 32 bit and 64 bit Lumira Desktop. If you are not using SSO, saplogon.ini is probably the only thing Lumira Desktop needs to know from SAP GUI. If you can see the BW landscape entries from Lumira Desktop, most likely you have already had a good SAP GUI installed (but this doesn't mean it properly configured). BTW, I believe 64 bit SAP GUI is still in planning phase and not released yet.
The 'unknow error' could be caused by different reasons as far as I have experienced. For now, customers have to trouble shootting by collecting trace logs where it usually reveals some hints for the root cause. I would like to post a seperate blog about this when I could have my hands free, but here are some quick things you can try:
1. Read the Lumira trace logs (located at %temp%\sapvi\logs)
2. If that's not enough, you can also enable and read the jco trace (here is an instruction how to enable jco trace: https://support.wdf.sap.corp/sap(bD1lbiZjPTAwMQ==)/bc/bsp/sno/ui_entry/entry.htm?param=69765F6D6F64653D3030312669765F736…)
Reading the tracelogs requires some developer skill and product knowledge, but sometimes it could quite easily be lucky if spotting to the correct place of the logs.
Hope this could help a little bit,
~xing
The note did it. Thanks!
Hi James,
Did you make it work to connect your BW from Lumira Desktop? I am curious what your finding is. Want to share your fix?
Thanks,
~xing
Yes. I did as suggested. Downloaded ZIP, setup Windows Environment Variable, and all is well!!
nice!
thanks!
jim
Nice! 🙂 Thank you for sharing.
Awesome. Glad it worked!
Hi Tammy,
Since this beautifull doc was posted an year back,
So wanted to confirm on whether Lumira Supports SAP BW hierarchies ?
Hierarchies are supported now. I have Desktop v1.22 and can connect to BW. But I fail to see how this is any more useful than creating nice charts and graphs through Excel with BEx or AFO. I would like to be able to storyboard with BW data in Lumira using Connect to SAP BW. Otherwise I need to crerate a universe connection to BW, which I can't w/o java stack. And even with that you can't use queries. Perhaps Lumira Server/Edge will allow you do do that in future versions.
is it a limitation that you can only have 1 BEX query per storyboard?
Hi Lance - today you can't use a BEx query on a storyboard; things are planned to change in the future on this
Hi Tammy,
do you remember in which version this type of connectivity (online BICS) disappeared?
Alexey - not sure; I know in 1.27 SAP has added the Download to BW extension Getting Familiar with SAP Lumira 1.27 BW Connectivity - that is not online
If you want online BW storyboard features please look at Design Studio Getting Familiar with Online Composition in Design Studio 1.5