Connect On-Premise HANA to Smart Business Service – An End-to-End Example

In my previous article SAP Smart Business Service – Create Analytic Content in HCP without Coding, I talked about Smart Business Service.

In this blog, I am going to show you how easy it is to enable Smart Business services on HCP using data from on-premise HANA system.

Prerequisites:

You must have subscribed and enabled Smart Business Service in your account. You may refer to below articles for that.

• How to Subscribe to SAP Smart Business Service
• Create Your First Smart Business KPI and Tiles in 10 Minutes

Now let’s see how to create a Smart Business KPI using on-premise HANA content.

Step 1: Create calculation view and XSOData in on-premise HANA system.

Smart Business can access the data from any OData source. In on-premise scenario, best option is to create a calculation view and expose that as OData.

You may refer to this article to know how to create a calculation view and this article for XSOData.

Note that XSOData must enable SAP annotation using OData4SAP.

Annotation is enabled using below code.

            annotations {

                 enable OData4SAP;

             }

It is important to note that OData services need to be annotated following OData4SAP standard in order to identify dimensions and measures on each entity.

Step 2: Configure HANA Cloud Connector

In HCP, it is possible to consume web services from your On-Premise with the help of SAP HANA Cloud Connector through a secure tunnel.  More details can be found at this help document.

Find below the steps to configure an internal host in your landscape as virtual host in SAP HANA Cloud Connector

Now you can see that your on-premise connection using SAP HANA Cloud Connector is visible in the Connectivity section of HCP Cockpit

Step 3: Enable Connectivity with your On-Premise System

In HANA Cloud Platform Destinations are used for the outbound communication of your application to a remote system (which can be a cloud or on-premise system). You can get more information about Destination here.

When you have enabled Smart Business Service, by default, number of destinations are created in your HCP cockpit for various purposes.  From Smart Business Service, you can connect up to 11 business applications/systems.  Destinations with names BusinessSystem00 to BusinessSystem10 are meant to be connecting to your backend systems.  BusinessSystem00 by default is associated to Smart Business Service Java application that has some demo analytic services.

In the Destinations section of HCP Cockpit, click “New Destination” button to create new destination.  Here we show an example of connecting your on-premise system “internal-host-in-your-on-premise-landscape:port” through virtual host your-virtual-host-1 using SAP HANA Cloud Connector.

Step 4: Enable Smart Business to discover HANA OData services by Calculation views

If your HANA system is HANA Live system or SAP Predictive Maintenance (PdMS) on-demand system, you will already have a capability to locate OData services by HANA views.

In other cases of regular HANA database systems, if you have numerous HANA views by which you would like to discover OData services, install Optional Delivery Unit (HCO_SSB_ADDON_OD) in your HANA system

Procedure on how to install Delivery Unit can be found here.

With this installation of optional Delivery Unit, in your HANA DB, we can search OData Service based on calculation views.

Step 5: Create Smart Business KPI and Tiles

Now we have configured the system and everything ready. Next step is creating Smart Business contents. To know more about how to create KPI, Evaluation and tiles refer to this article.

Finally we should be able to get Smart Business KPI and Tiles similar to below.

Note: A complete implementation guide on Smart Business Service is also available at SAP-Press.