Technical Articles
Maintain SAP BOBJ security settings, Disable Edit and design for public folder reports
Learn how you could add Security settings to SAP BOBJ server 4.2 or higher. This article talks about some of the common security settings that can be applied for BOBJ implementation project. These settings do not exist by default in the system but is strongly recommended as these are some of the best practices we followed by working with clients and can help to meet the business requirement.
- Security Settings like
- To hide folders
- To restrict Save on Public folder
- Not allow design button to be enabled
- Export issue where report default file format comes as .pdf instead of XLS or XLSX : This is not really a security setting but system limitation and standard behavior.
1. SAP BOBJ Security Settings
1.1. To hide folders
In order to hide some folders from the end user we found below.
- Go to folders option
- Right click on the specific folder
- Go to user security
Update the settings for the folder which should be hidden in user security as shown below by provided “No access”.
After the above setting was maintained system folder is now removed from user BI console.
1.2. To restrict save on Public folder
Below screenshot shows that user can only use option Save AS and not save as this is a public report which should not allow user to modify.
Even if the user tries to save as in the public folder it would get an error “Could not save the document to the repository…”
This setting can be enabled by following below steps
Follow the same steps as we discussed earlier by going to Folder option in CMC console
- Select Specific folder
- Right click and go to User security
- Now Navigate to additional security
Add the role as View on Demand and navigate to Advanced tab
After you save the above setting it would look like below
1.3. Control Design button to be enabled/disabled
Tried to follow the note as below
2058429 – How to disable Design button for reports only in public folders and leave it available for the reports in user Favorites
This did not help so I had to follow below steps to ensure the design button is enabled even though the user is not able to save in the Public folder. Select the application Option in CMC > Web intelligence
Select User security again and this time if you give full control it allows users to use the Design button and if that is not needed remove the button.
2. Export report, default file format is .pdf, it should be .xlsx
As seen below default file format shown is PDF and earlier was XLSX
As mentioned in the OSS note this is a system limitation
https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2434556
However, the workaround which we found for this one was related to using the Fiori Launchpad then it shows default export format as XLS and not PDF.
SAP BOBJ Security settings
To summarize it was explained how to Maintain SAP BOBJ security settings:
- To hide folders
- To restrict Save on Public folder
- Not allow design button to be enabled
There may be some hit and trial involved if you have a complex set of requirements to be met as BOBJ has more than 400+ authority objects that can be modified. Hope this article explained these SAP BOBJ Security settings in detail and could assist in implementing some of these settings.
There is another article I wrote sometime back for some common fixes and steps to resolve errors in BOBJ. Please read it further here if you are interested
https://blogs.sap.com/2019/10/28/sap-bobj-troubleshooting-tips-fixes-applied/
Please share your comments and feedback.
Note the original article was published in the link below
Thanks for reading