Set Accept-Language as allowed header for Live Data Connection to SAP HANA

Dear community members,

Recently I struggled with a strange issue and, as always, resolving it was a matter of changing a setting. Because I want to save you some time, let me share my issue and how to resolve it in this blog.

Issue:

One of the users (user A) in SAP Analytics Cloud was facing the issue that no data was displayed when accessing a story using a Live data connection to SAP HANA using SAML SSO. When accessing the same story in Edge, data was displayed without any issue. Other users, amongst myself (user B), could access to story and retrieve the data in Chrome without any issues, even using the same device.

Analysis:

I started my analysis by using the Developer Tools in Chrome (via F12) and save a HAR file (HTML Archive) of both the workflows. I compared both and noticed that there was an ‘accept-language’ header in the request of user A but with no value. For user B this header was not present in the request.

Looking at the available help documentation I noticed SAP updated the section regarding the ‘Allowed Headers’ that need to be set for the CORS configuration in SAP HANA. The ‘accept-language’ header is now part (not sure for how long) of the list.

Resolution:

After updating the ‘Allowed Headers’ with the value ‘accept-language’ as displayed below, I asked user A to validate and now it works again. When explaining the solution, user A did mention he changed the language settings in SAP Analytics Cloud around the time the issue occurred.

Conclusion:

Since we implemented the CORS settings and SAP HANA Live connectivity already in early 2018, I was not aware of this recent change. Or at least it was never exposed as an issue. It would be great if, besides subscribing to SAP notes, there would be an option to subscribe to notifications related to these kinds of updates since they could have a potential effect for your organization.

If you have any questions, please contact me!

Thanks for reading!

Kind regards,

Martijn van Foeken | Interdobs