Enhancement to SAP BW integration in BI 4.1 SP05

SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and Crystal Report for Enterprise now supports (from BI 4.1 SP05) manual entry of values for variables.

With this enhancements the end users now would be able to simply type in a values in the text box for manual entry instead of selecting each values from List of Values.

Note: Manual entry would be enabled on Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports for Enterprise clients only when the BEX Query variable is created with “Manual Entry/Default value” processing type in BEX Query designer

Upon updating your environment to BI 4.1 SP05, Manual entry of values would be supported on following variable types.

• Single value variable
• Multi single value variable
• Interval (range) value variable
• Single keydate variable
• Formula variable
• Selection Option variable

By default, selection option variables are mapped to a range. In order to use this feature, selection option variables has to be mapped to a multi-value prompt, for which you would have to run the following command depending on the client.

Note: Manual entry support will be enabled for other listed variables types by default with BI 4.1 SP05

For Webi:

• Webi Rich Client: Run Registry Editor and Add the entry “Dsap.sl.bics.variableComplexSelectionMapping=multivalue” in the following registry key and restart the client

• Webi Java and DHTML Viewer: Launch CMC -> Servers -> WebI Adaptive Processing Server ->Properties -> in command line parameters add the entry “Dsap.sl.bics.variableComplexSelectionMapping=multivalue”

For CR:

• CR4E: In the config file, add the entry “sap.sl.bics.variableComplexSelectionMapping=multivalue” and restart the client

        Config file is located at “[Install_Dir]\Crystal Reports for Enterprise XI 4.0\configuration\config.ini”

• CR Viewer: Launch CMC -> Servers -> Crystal Reports Processing Server ->Properties -> Java child VM arguments add the entry  “Dsap.sl.bics.variableComplexSelectionMapping=multivalue”

With Manual entry of values you can make use of expressions and patterns to reduce the number of values to be filled and speed up the selection process depending on the requirement, following are couple of examples.

• Single member: 1
• Interval: 1 – 5 (do include the spaces)
• Expressions with operators: >4 , >=4 , <4 , <=4
• Exclusions: !5 (any key but 5)
• Combinations: 1 – 10 ; !5 (all the keys from 1 to 10 except 5)
• Patterns: *1 : all keys that end in 1 (for ex. 01, 11, 21) and *1* : all keys that include 1 (for ex. 01, 10, 11, 12, 13, 21)

The support for manual entry of values does not have any impact on the existing capability to select values from List of Values, users can still continue to make use of list of values for providing values for prompts.

With this enhancement, following is the consolidated list of clients supporting manual entry of values for variables.

    Reporting:

• Web Intelligence
• Crystal Report for Enterprise

    Dashboarding & Apps:

• Design Studio

    Agile Visualization:

• Lumira Desktop
• Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office
• Analysis, edition for OLAP
• Explorer

Refer to SAP Note 1869560 for detailed SAP Integration support matrix for BI on BW.