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Author's profile photo Laura VEGA
Laura VEGA
September 18, 2020 1 minute read

Live Data Connect 3.1 for BOBJ is released

Where to find Live Data Connect 3.1

After successful release of Live Data Connect 3.0 in July 2020, we are pleased to announce that version 3.1 has been released this week and available for download in SAP Market Place:

Download Live Data Connect 3.1

 

As a reminder, Live Data Connect 3.0 for Universes offers following features to our on premise customers:

  • It allows SAP Analytics Cloud to connect to On Premise Data, exposed through the universes
  • It enables a LIVE access towards these data
  • The data are never uploaded into the CLOUD or SAP Analytics Cloud: they stay behind your firewall, into your corporate network
  • And you can access and re-use, as is, all your existing relational universes of type .UNV and .UNX

 

What is new in Live Data Connect 3.1

With Live Data Connect 3.1, you get now the ability to access not only Universes, but also Web Intelligence Data Models. What does it mean?

From Sap Analytics Cloud, when creating a story with Live Data Connect, yo will be able to select a Web Intelligence document and to build your query on top of the document data providers objects. This means you can leverage all calculations and synchronization efforts made in the Web Intelligence documents.

You ca find more information in the Live Data Connection 3.1 SAP Note

 

User friendly workflow

These are the steps to follow to create your SAP Analytics Cloud story on to of a Web Intelligence document.

 

 

What is next?

Live Data Connect for BOBJ is enhanced every quarter with new features, so stay tuned for the coming release in Q4 2020.

In the meanwhile, enjoy this brand new release !

 

 

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      Author's profile photo Ondrej Horyna
      Ondrej Horyna

      Hello, thank you for this post. If I may, this live connect has kind of issue - function grandtotal is disabled. Have you some kind of way, how to achieve percentage values (in tables, tree charts..)? Or I do something wrong. Thanks a lot.

      Author's profile photo Laura VEGA
      Laura VEGA
      Blog Post Author

      Hello,

      no you are doing nothing wrong. Some features are not yet available in the live LDC connection for BOBJ, Grandtotal is one of them. It is in our product backlog though.

      One wrkaround could be to connect to your BOBJ data using acquisition mode.

      Thanks

      Laura

      Author's profile photo Ondrej Horyna
      Ondrej Horyna

      Thank you a lot 🙂

      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      Hi Laura VEGA Many thanks for the blog!

      small remark -  the link to the SAP Note needs updating in your blog (currently an internal reference).  Here's the customer facing URL https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2771921

      Regards, H

      Author's profile photo Laura VEGA
      Laura VEGA
      Blog Post Author

      Thanks Henry! I have updated the link.

      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      Hi Laura VEGA  A customer of mine would like to know how long this update task takes when redeploying?  and are there any best-practices around preserving configuration so that they don't overwrite stuff ?  Regards, H

      Author's profile photo Laura VEGA
      Laura VEGA
      Blog Post Author

      For an upgrade from 3.0  to 3.1, you just need to backup the "conf"  folder contents, and recover it after the 3.1 zip extraction. This is also explained in LDC documentation.

      For an upgrade from 2.x to 3.x, you need more work as configuration has totally changed and been regrouped in one place.

      Thanks

      Laura

      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      great thanks!

      Author's profile photo Piotr Tesny
      Piotr Tesny

      Hello,

      From version 3.0 onwards we dropped tomcat deployments as rather complex and cumbersome. With LDC 3.x we use standalone jetty engine instead. And there is one single configuration file called LDC.properties where all the configuration is centralised and which you can carry across future releases. Please refer to product documentation for further details.

      best wishes

      Piotr

      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      superman, cheers!

      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      Hi Laura VEGA Hi Piotr Tesny

      Sorry to bother, i had a question from an interested customer who was asking  whether this new release can be deployed in a clustered BI environment ?

      they were of the opinion that this was a limitation with the previous version so could not adopt, however they are curious to know more as of now?

      Regards

      H

      Author's profile photo Piotr Tesny
      Piotr Tesny

      Hello,

      In a nutshell this scenario is described in this guide: Configuring SAP BusinessObjects Live Data Connect

       

      Parameter Description Mandatory
      boe.restsdkurl

      Previously known as boe.restUrl

      		 The URL for the REST Web Services exposed by the BI platform. Yes
      boe.nameServer

      Default value: The server used in the boe.restsdk.url parameter. The port is 6400.

      If there’s an error, use the cluster name value. You’ll find it in the Central Management Console, under Settings  Cluster.

      		 Name server host and port defining the system to connect to. If your CMS repository is running on a different machine than the one running the REST Web Services, use this parameter to set the server and port used by the CMS repository.

      By default, if you don't set this parameter, the information is retrieved from the boe.restsdkurl parameter.

      For more information, see The CMS uses two ports.

      For more information, refer to the Business Intelligence Adminstrator Guide.

      		 No

      best wishes

      Piotr

      Author's profile photo Denis Konovalov
      Denis Konovalov

      Hello Piotr,

      This phrase is wrong " If your CMS repository is running on a different machine than the one running the REST Web Services, use this parameter to set the server and port used by the CMS repository."

      Because :
      a. CMS repository is not a server, it is a database.
      b. boe.nameServer refers to the CMS server or a cluster name of the CMS cluster. So it is a CMS server name and port or a BOE system cluster name.

      Author's profile photo Piotr Tesny
      Piotr Tesny

      Hello. Thanks. That's a documentation error. I will pass it to the colleagues in charge of the documentation and ask for correction. best regards.

      Author's profile photo Dario Vargas
      Dario Vargas

      Hi everyone,

      I'm new with LDC 3.1, configured successsfully 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 with SAPBO4.2 SP06+ and https

      Probably is a silly quaestion, but i don't know what to do with connector.https.keystore.file and connector.https.keystore.password, these parameters are new, please can you help me ??, it's necessary to define a keystore now ?

      Regards,

      Dario

      Author's profile photo Laura VEGA
      Laura VEGA
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Dario,

      you will find configuration explanations for LDC 3.0 and 3.1 here:

      https://help.sap.com/viewer/6be6d1fc887046f7a5e5c1aa52505e86/latest/en-US/14b7943431bb4fb08b73b6ef4f43ab88.html

      https://apps.support.sap.com/sap/support/knowledge/en/2944676

      You will find there the table for parameters, and see that the 2 parameters you are asking for are for SSL configuration:

      boe.restsdkurl The URL for the REST Web Services exposed by the BI platform(i.e., http://localhost:8080/biprws)
      boe.authenticationMode BIP authentication mode. Possible modes are:

      • saml .
      • secEnterprise, for enterprise authentication.
      • secSAPR3, for SAP authentication.
      connector.https.port The port for the LDC HTTPS server (i.e., 8443)
      connector.https.keystore.file The path to the SSL keystore.
      connector.https.keystore.password The password for the SSL keystore.
      cors.allowed.origins.urls List of allowed origin URLs for CORS eg. https://tenantname.eu10.sapanalytics.cloud

      Regards

      Laura

      Author's profile photo Geetha Ramu
      Geetha Ramu

      Hi Laura,

       

      Thank you for the information shared above regarding configuration of SSL parameters. I have configured the path for "connector.https.keystore.file" as "D:\ssl\keystore". But, while activating the LDC, the path being considered is "D:\BO\BusinessObjects4.0\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0-win64_x64\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0\conf\D:sslkeystore".

      Please see below error message:

      SAP Live Data Connect service
      SAP Live Data Connect service failed with error: JavaVirtualMachine::NewObject : NewObject : Exception: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Property file : 'connector.https.keystore.file'='D:sslkeystore' (D:\BO\BusinessObjects4.0\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0-win64_x64\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0\conf\D:sslkeystore) defined in 'D:\BO\BusinessObjects4.0\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0-win64_x64\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0\conf\LDC.properties' doesn't exist.

       

      Please suggest how to define the parameter "connector.https.keystore.file"

       

      Thanks,

      Geetha

       

      Author's profile photo Benoît Ripert
      Benoît Ripert

      Hi Laura VEGA

       

      I’ve followed the steps in the guide and LDC is accessible

      When I try to create a connection from SAC, I get this message :

      Protocol Error: Error [Protocol]: (#73) Unauthorized
Error [Protocol]: (#401) Unauthorized
{
"Messages": [
{
"Type": 2,
"Number": 0,
"Text": "[repo_proxy 13] SessionFacade::openSessionLogon with user info has failed(Unable to connect to CMS <SERVER.IP>:6400. A wrong connection is made to @@<SERVER.NAME>:6400(<SERVER.NAME>:6400). Logon cannot continue.(hr=#0x80042a79)"
....
      We have tryed and get the same issue with both SAP BI 4.2 and SAP BI 4.3 as source.
      Our BI plateforms are accessible by public IP over internet.

       

      According to https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2950708

      we have set paramter boe.nameServer to the exact internal hostname as shown in CMC

       

      boe.restsdkurl, boe.authenticationMode, connector.https.port, connector.https.keystore.file, connector.https.keystore.password and cors.allowed.origins.urls are also set correctly.

      Is there something we have missed ?

       

      Thanks a lot for your help.
      Regards.
      Benoit.
      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      Hi Benoît Ripert

      I've come to find out through Note 2983433 - "Unable to initialize the session manager error with Live Data Connect 3.x"

      .. that this issue is currently under investigation with product development. David MOBBS may be able to comment further.

      I'd recommend you log this case with product support https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/incident/create to component LOD-ANA-LDC-UNV

      unfortunately, it don't have visibility of which partner you work for and which customer you are assisting, but it may be that a colleague of yours is already in touch with SAP.

      regards

      H

      Author's profile photo David MOBBS
      David MOBBS

      Hello,

      I think you should log a ticket for this.

      At first glance everything seems fine, but a ticket would provide a framework to dig deeper, exchange logs, check configuration files, etc.

      Your issue doesn't look like the one Henry mentions, which results in a different error message.

      Regards,

      David.

      Author's profile photo Benoît Ripert
      Benoît Ripert

      David MOBBS , Henry , thanks for your answers.

      I'm going to log a ticket and I'll come back here when we find the solution.

       

      Regards

       

      Ben

      Author's profile photo Piotr Tesny
      Piotr Tesny

      Hello.

      Indeed I am aligned with David on this. Please raise a ticket.

      At the first glance, judging from the screenshot above, your SSL certificate is a self-signed certificate.  That cannot work with SAP Analytics Cloud.

      You must use an SSL certificate signed by a CA (Certificate Authority);

      best regards; Piotr

       

      Author's profile photo Benoît Ripert
      Benoît Ripert

      Hi.

       

      The certificate was one of my guess but I could not find any official SAP documentation about that. Do you know one that says explicitally that it takes a certificate signed by a CA for LDC to work with SAC ?

      Also, is it the LDC certificate only, or the BI platform certificate ? Or both ?

       

      I'll try and let you know.

       

      Thanks a lot for your help Piotr.

       

      Regards.

       

      Ben

      Author's profile photo Piotr Tesny
      Piotr Tesny

      Hello Ben,

      As mentioned in my first reply this is SAC that requires a secure HTTPS live connection endpoint with a trusted (signed) SSL certificate.

      There is tons of KBs, community briefs etc. on this topic. For instance https://apps.support.sap.com/sap/support/knowledge/en/2482807.

      Regarding the 2nd part of the question. I cannot answer it. Please contact SAP Product Support for guidance.

      In a nutshell, a trusted, CA-signed SSL certificate is delivered for a fully qualified domain name. This ensures maximum security; This means one SSL certificate for each HTTPS endpoint.

      However, most of the Certificate Authorities can offer wild-card certificates for the domain name allowing to have one single SSL certificate for a network domain.

      If this were the case then one might use the same SSL certificate between software components residing in the same network domain. Please contact SAP Product Support for further guidance.

      best wishes

      Piotr

       

      Author's profile photo Keith Fisher
      Keith Fisher

      Hi there,

      great blog and I'm looking forward to using the 'WebI reports as a data source' option - but can I deploy LDC 3.1 to a server that is in a .local domain? The need for a non-self-signed cert suggests not.

       

      thanks

      Keith

      Author's profile photo David MOBBS
      David MOBBS

      Hello,

      Signed certificate and deployment in a local domain are 2 distinct topics.

      LDC is going to be accessed by the browsers from your users connected to SAC. If all these users are in a local domain, then the LDC server can be in a local domain. I think many deployments rely on such topology.

      Signed certificate is a requirement that originates in browser policies. When a site is accessed in https, all underlying services have to accessed through https as well. In our case SAC is an https website, so LDC (underlying service) has to be accessed through https as well. It doesn't matter that LDC is in a local domain or not, it is sitting behind SAC from the browser's point of view.

      Regards,

      David.

       

      Author's profile photo Brandon Novy
      Brandon Novy

      Hi,

      My tenant was upgraded to 2020.21 over the weekend, but I do not see WID files in my list of live universes. I have been using Live Data Connect 3.1 since September. I do see UNV and UNX. Is there a trick to allow WID files to appear? I am using BusinessObjects 4.2 SP8.

      Thanks,

      Brandon

      Author's profile photo Laura VEGA
      Laura VEGA
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Brandon,

      yes I forgot to mention you need to set the WID docs you want to see appear in SAC to a specific Category in BOE.

      In the config file ldc.properties, you can use the parameter "boe.webi.category.cuid" to define this category. Only documents present in this category will be listed in the LDC connection.

      Regards

      Laura

      Author's profile photo Brandon Novy
      Brandon Novy

      Thanks! It’s working for me.

      A big difference I notice comparing Dashboards (Xcelsius) to SAC with Web Intelligence is that Dashboards uses data from the tables in the WebI documents while SAC seems to be using data from the cached data provider and variables in the document.

      Author's profile photo lloyd Davis
      lloyd Davis

      Hello David MOBBS , Piotr Tesny , Laura VEGA

      I am currently installing the Live Data Connect 3.2 and have run into a few issues with the HTTPS specific parameters and can’t seem to find any documentation on the following:

       

      1. connector.https.port

      –        The default value of this parameter is 0. What are the implications of leaving this as 0 as it                   says this parameter is not mandatory?

      –        Our SAP Analytics Cloud tenant is HTTPS, so if we need this parameter could you please                  advise on how we find / create this port. Is this a port created in the Windows Firewall on the server that we are installing the LDC?

       

      2. connector.https.keystore.file & connector.https.keystore.password

      –        If we set the first parameter we then need to set the parameters for the two above. Do you                  have any documentation on how we do this?

      –        Are you able to point me towards any documentation on creating SSL certificates for the                    LDC?

      Thanks,

      Lloyd.

      Author's profile photo David MOBBS
      David MOBBS

      Hello,

      Https port and keystore both need to be set.

      Browser policies impose that when connecting to a website in https, all invoked services must rely on https as well. In our case, you are connecting to the SAC tenant using https, to the LDC service which gets invoked must expose https as well.

      These security policies also imply that you need a certificate signed by a valid authority for your server.

      So I would recommend that you reach out to your security or network management colleagues, they should be able to provide you with a signed certificate, or guide you through the process of generating one. This process is specific to every organization.

      Regards,

      David.

      Author's profile photo lloyd Davis
      lloyd Davis

      Thank you David MOBBS

      I have now managed to configure all mandatory parameters in the LDC.properties file including the HTTPS / SSL issues I was previously having.

      But when I was running the LDC executable it seems that nothing happens. So I installed the LDC as a Windows Service and run from there and it fails to start.

      I checked the errors in the System Event Log on Windows and it says 'The remote server has been paused or is in the process of being started'.

      I have also checked the logs folder within the LDC install and each time I try to start LDC it writes a log which does not show any specific error. However I did notice the log ends with 'ConfigurationFile Loading' and then nothing afterwards.

      Have you seen this issue before? Or if you're able to point me in the direction of any relevant documentation that would be great.

      Thanks & Regards,

      Lloyd.

      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      Hi lloyd Davis  have you been able to make any progress with this service-not-starting problem?

      I'm not sure if it's related, but i saw a support article 2985974 - SAP Live Data Connect not starting on Windows Server  which suggests Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013 are needed from https://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=40784

      Would be good to know where you are at with this.

      Regards, H

      fyi David MOBBS Piotr Tesny

      Author's profile photo lloyd Davis
      lloyd Davis

      Hi Henry

      Thanks for the reply, I am still having this issue unfortunately.

      I have checked the server and VISUAL C++ Redistributable Packages are installed from 2005 to 2019 (including 2013).

      I checked the SAP Note and it mentions an error. But the issue we are having is that there is no error. When I run the LDC executable the command prompt appears for a second or so then disappears. And the log just ends with 'ConfigurationFile Loading'.

      Thanks & Regards,

      Lloyd.

      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      Hi lloyd Davis  thanks for confirming.

      Are you able to revert back the config file changes to check that the service can still start with its default setting?

      another idea, are you running service/executable 'Run As' .. Administrator?

      also, is your certificate self-signed or issued by a CA?

      there must be a problem with one of the properties set in the config file, or something isn't reachable from this LDC machine.

      I think it might be prudent to log a support ticket Contact SAP Support - SAP ONE Support Launchpad  please use component LOD-ANA-LDC-UNV

      regards

      H

      Author's profile photo lloyd Davis
      lloyd Davis

      Hi Henry

      I have tried to run as an administrator but seem to get the same result.

      The certificate is issued by a CA. I created the keystore & CSR and sent it to be signed. I then imported the 3 .cer files into the keystore.

      I have raised a ticket with SAP and we had a call to discuss the issue, but a solution was not found over the phone. So I was told I am going to be sent some additional documents to go through, so just waiting on those.

      One thing that may be worth me mentioning. In the documentation it says that as Tomcat is no longer needed with LDC 3.2 & if it is installed for a previous version of the LDC then it needs to be deleted. I have disabled the Service instead of deleting in case we needed to revert back for whatever reason in the future. Would that cause an issue?

      Thanks & Regards,

      Lloyd.

      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      Thanks for your time on the phone earlier lloyd Davis  and thanks for submitting incident 38748 to product support.

      thanks for seeking approvals internally at the client-site to uninstall the old LUC 2.x which is coexisting alongside the troublesome new LDC 3.x .

      I've updated the engineer about our discussion and am hoping that Ms. Apoorva touches base with dev David MOBBS to confirm.

      Regards, Henry

       

       

      Author's profile photo Geetha Ramu
      Geetha Ramu

      Hello Henry,

      Thank you for the information shared above regarding configuration of SSL parameters. I have configured the path for "connector.https.keystore.file" as "D:\ssl\keystore". But, while activating the LDC, the path being considered is "D:\BO\BusinessObjects4.0\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0-win64_x64\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0\conf\D:sslkeystore".

      Please see below error message:

      SAP Live Data Connect service
      SAP Live Data Connect service failed with error: JavaVirtualMachine::NewObject : NewObject : Exception: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Property file : 'connector.https.keystore.file'='D:sslkeystore' (D:\BO\BusinessObjects4.0\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0-win64_x64\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0\conf\D:sslkeystore) defined in 'D:\BO\BusinessObjects4.0\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0-win64_x64\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0\conf\LDC.properties' doesn't exist.

       

      Please suggest how to define the parameter "connector.https.keystore.file"

      Author's profile photo Dave Gillaspy
      Dave Gillaspy

      Hi all, we are tryingto use LDC and have the authentication mode to LDAP, and the service just wont start when we select it

       https://help.sap.com/doc/8238f7ab22884808a738768cdebe30b9/latest/en-US/sbo_live_data_connect_user_3.0.pdf

       this user guide talks about setting the value to secLDAP

       https://help.sap.com/viewer/6be6d1fc887046f7a5e5c1aa52505e86/latest/en-US/14b7943431bb4fb08b73b6ef4f43ab88.html

       this user guide talks about setting the setting to ldap

       the config file doesn’t mention ldap at all

      Is it possible to use LDAP and if so how do we implement it? David MOBBS am we making any mistakes here?

       

      thanks

       

      Dave

       

      Author's profile photo Geetha Ramu
      Geetha Ramu

      Hi,

      Thank you for the information shared above regarding configuration of SSL parameters. I have configured the path for "connector.https.keystore.file" as "D:\ssl\keystore". But, while activating the LDC, the path being considered is "D:\BO\BusinessObjects4.0\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0-win64_x64\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0\conf\D:sslkeystore".

      Please see below error message:

      SAP Live Data Connect service
      SAP Live Data Connect service failed with error: JavaVirtualMachine::NewObject : NewObject : Exception: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Property file : 'connector.https.keystore.file'='D:sslkeystore' (D:\BO\BusinessObjects4.0\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0-win64_x64\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0\conf\D:sslkeystore) defined in 'D:\BO\BusinessObjects4.0\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0-win64_x64\cs_ina_ldc-3.2.0\conf\LDC.properties' doesn't exist.

       

      Please suggest how to define the parameter "connector.https.keystore.file"