Design Studio 1.4 RRI and Open Document

This blog looks at how you can use BW BEx RRI functionality to Jump from a Design Studio application to Analysis OLAP (AOLAP) application using Open Document functionality available on the BI Platform.

This feature can be used when you want to drilldown from a Design Studio Crosstab to a AOLAP or WebI document.

Demo:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=W7sRVOl0TSg

The clarity is better when you watch directly in YouTube.

Even though this blog uses AOLAP as an example but a similar approach could be taken to jump to a WebI report from Design Studio passing filter/variable parameters.

Software Platform:

• BI 4.1 SPS 5
• Design Studio 1.4 SP 0
• BW 7.4 SP 8 on HANA SPS 8 (Rev 82)

This section explains how to configure RRI for BW query.:

1) Create a new RRI receiver for query from tcode RSBBS. Select sender query and hit create.

2) Select Web Address and click on the Input help icon next to the “Receiver Object”

3) In the next screen you can type in the Open Document URL for the Analysis OLAP application.  The highlighted ID below should be replaced with the CUID for the AOLAP application or WebI document in your BI Platform (You can get the CUID by right click properties on the Analysis Application from BI Launchpad).

You can either use relative URL or full URL for the Open Doc URL for the document in the BI Platform, in this case the relative URL is used as both the Design Studio and AOLAP applications are deployed on the same BI Platform.  If you use relative URL as shown below you do not have to change the RSBBS settings when the queries are transported to different systems.  Downside for using the relative URL is the Jump Target will not work from other applications like BEx Web or Analysis for Office.

This etutorial has more details on getting open document URL for AOLAP.  Analysis OLAP 4.1: Create a link to open a workspace and pass a parameter value

4) Next step is to configure the assignment details to pass the variable values to the target application.

Here you will be able to provide the URL parameters which the target application is expecting, for AOLAP the syntax for passing BW Variable values is lsS<BW Variable Technical ID>.  You can check this document from Koen Hesters for more details on the variable syntax for Open document.

In this case the BEx query used in the target AOLAP application has two input ready variables: ZCALYEAR (single value) and ZCCODE.  You can enter the URL parameter as “lsSZCALYEAR”  and lsSZCCODE (the syntax for passing Variables to AOLAP applications).  If you have more variables in the target application you can enter those variable names in the Field Name column. Hit Apply

If you are using WebI as the target a similar approach can be used, need to make sure the parameter syntax is follows the WebI naming conventions for Open Doc.

5)  In the next screen you can change the description of the RRI Receiver, this will be the name which will appear in the Context Menu in the Design Studio Application.

After the changes are done hit “Apply”. Now the configuration on the BW side is complete.

Next step is to create a Design Studio application which use the BEx query (ZBWDEMO_Q001).

1) Create a Design Studio application based on the Adhoc template and save it to the BI Platform

2) Make the following changes to the existing Data Source DS_1.

• Load in Script = false
• Point the Connection to the BW Query which has the RRI defined, ZBWDEMO_Q001 in this case.

3) In the Outline section, under  “Technical Components” right click and add a “Context Menu”

4) Click on Crosstab properties and make sure the “Context Menu enabled” property of Cross-tab is set to “True”

5) Save the Application and Execute on Platform.

Right click on the Cross-Tab and you will be able to see the Context Menu, under Jump To you can see the link to “Monthly Trend – AOLAP” configured from BW.  Click on the link and a new window will be opened with the AOLAP document.

The result in the AOLAP document will be filtered based on the cell you had clicked to enable the  Context Menu, in this example the AOLAP report will display data for Year = 2010 and Company Code = 3333.  If you right click on Results row data will be filtered for Year = 2010 and no Company Code filter will be applied.

Please note that that RRI will not work in “Local Execution” mode. You have to use the option “Execute on BI Platform” or log into BI Launch Pad and execute from there.