SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook review

I was recently asked by Packt Publishing to review Xavier Hacking and David Lai “SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook”. I just finished reading the book, and wanted to share some thoughts.

The book’s 10 main chapters successfully provide “Over 90 simple and incredibly effective recipes for transforming your business data into exciting dashboards”. The authors have done a great job in selecting their recipes to cover common use cases most designers will face.  This allows readers with a specific issue to skim through the Table of Contents for a relevant recipe and then work through the provided example. The recipes cover a wide array of topics, starting with topics relevant to beginners who are looking to understand fundamental best practices, to advanced users who are looking for new creative ways to enhance their Xcelsius skills.

The first chapter provides some useful time saving tips for working with the embedded Excel spreadsheet within SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards. The later chapters of the book cover recipes for using the variety of out-of-the-box product components and present detailed coverage of topics including alerting, interactivity, and dynamic visibility. This cookbook is up to date with the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 release, and contains recipes for using Universe queries and directly binding query data to other canvas components.

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook is a recommended resource for a wide range of users. Dashboard designers new to the product as well as more experienced users will find many useful recipes.

The book is available on the publisher’s webpage:

http://www.packtpub.com/sap-businessobjects-dashboards-4-0-cookbook/book

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook

Packt Publishing has released SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook and I am pleased to receive an eBook edition to review. Xcelsius 2008 was recently included in SAP’s BusinessObjects 4.0 family, rebranding “Xcelsius Enterprise” as "SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0". Two of the top experts in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, David Lai(@davidlai101) and Xavier Hacking(@xjhacking), documented their knowledge in this book.

I plan to read the cookbook over the next two weeks and write a detailed review. This is going to be interesting! 

Cool stuff: SAP HANA and Microsoft Xbox Kinect

Capturing MDX statement in SAP BW for a BusinessObjects WebI/universe query

There are often times where you need to retrieve MDX query being generated while executing BusinessObjects Web Intelligence reports or universe queries. One of the scenarios where MDX can help is in analyzing the performance bottlenecks.

Following are the steps to capture MDX query in SAP BW. I am assuming that single-sign-on is in place and BusinessObjects enterprise IDs are mapped to the BW IDs.

1) Activate trace in BW for the user who is running the report in BusinessObjects environment. Go to transaction code RSTT and activate the trace.

2) Run the report/query in BusinessObjects (or perform the action which needs to be analyzed from performance standpoint.

3) Once done, deactivate the trace in RSTT.

4) Go to Trace Collection and open the corresponding trace record.

5) The next screen contains detailed information about the trace. It includes attributes(author, environment, etc.), recorded program objects, sequence information, etc.

6) Go to recorded program objects tab and locate the 'BAPI_MDDATASET_SELECT_DATA' program module. Open the same by double clicking it.

7) It opens up an ABAP Debugger session. Set a breakpoint at CL_RSR_MDX_COMMAND~START

 

8) Once breakpoint is set, continue debugging till you reach the breakpoint. Keep a watch on the N_T_MDX table.

9) Open the N_T_MDX table and you can see the generated MDX statements.

List of Values(LoVs) caching in BO XI 3.1 SP3

Recently, I came across a weird behavior while working with BusinessObjects Web Intelligence. I have divisional hierarchy in the prompts for all the WebI reports. Now, inspite of having SSO as authentication mode for the universe connection, the LoVs were getting cached!! As a result, the users were able to see the divisional hierarchy nodes which they don't have access to.

It was a security nightmare. Alright, it was not that bad. Though users were able see and select the nodes, they were getting authorization error message. The users had to use 'Refresh values' option in the prompt window to get the correct LoVs. While technically good, it was not a very pleasant user experience.

This is a bug in BusinessObjects XI 3.1 SP3. By design, when SSO is defined as universe connection mode, the LoVs should not be cached. This was discovered only recently because it turned out that entire BO community had BI_ALL. I will not dwell much onto that but not sure why everyone had this super privilege. When we started removing BI_ALL, the issue surfaced.

We raised OSS with SAP. They acknowledged it as a bug and suggested to apply FP 3.2/FP 3.6 or even upgrade to SP4. They released a note 1519503 on this.

Here is the interesting part. We had a call on 06/22/2011 with BO support team on this and they acknowledged the issue as a product bug. Immediately after the call, SAP released the note :).

SAP BI Quality Dashboard architecture

Deploying SAP Dashboard (formerly Xcelsius) - Crossdomain policy file

Cross domain policy file is an important configuration to consider while deploying SAP Dashboard(formerly Xcelsius). The SAP BW Quality dashboard, that I recently worked on, is deployed on the BusinessObjects Infoview and  pulls data from SAP ECC and SAP BW for reconciling Orders and Revenue numbers. The flash object that Xcelsius creates run in the browser on the client machine. It follows the security guidelines set by Adobe while accessing external data.

Adobe has introduced a new security policy for the flash palyer 9 & 10. That prevents the Xcelsius dashboard from accessing data from external sources and throws error #2170. In my case, external sources are ECC and BW. To get around this, the cross domain XML file needs to be updated with the following tag:

<allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*" secure="false" />

The crossdomain.xml is located at <BusinessObjects installation directory>\Tomcat55\webapps\ROOT\ and should look like this-

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
   <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*" secure="false" />
   <allow-access-from domain="*" secure="false" />
</cross-domain-policy>

Update the file, restart Tomcat (web server) and you're done!

Deploying SAP Dashboard (formerly Xcelsius) - OpenDocument settings

Recently, I developed Xcelsius based dashboard for SAP BW Quality. Purpose of the dashboard is to provide the users with real time information of BW data loads, display ECC and BW values reconciliation and smart alerts based on business processes. The dashboard is published to BusinessObjects Infoview.

As part of the requirements,  business needed a direct URL to the dashboard such that the users are presented with the dashboard directly upon login. I published an OpenDocument URL for the dashboard. However, there is a setting for authentication type in the web.xml within the path . This setting determines the default authenticate type to be used. Also, the same web.xml has a setting whether to allow users to change the authentication type (for example SAP, Enterprise, etc.) 

<!-- You can specify the default Authentication types here -->
<!-- secEnterprise, secLDAP, secWinAD, secSAPR3 -->
<context-param>
    <param-name>opendoc.authentication.default</param-name>
    <param-value>secSAPR3</param-value>
</context-param>

 <!-- Choose whether to let the user change the authentication type -->
<!-- If it isn't shown the default authentication type from above will be used -->
<context-param>
<param-name>opendoc.authentication.visible</param-name>
<param-value>false</param-value>
</context-param>

We give out Enterprise IDs to end users. On the server side, these IDs are mapped to their SAP BW credentials. Strangely, the default authentication was set to 'SAP' instead of 'Enterprise'. I suspect 'SAP integration kit' as a culprit.

I updated the web.xml as follows:

<!-- You can specify the default Authentication types here -->
<!-- secEnterprise, secLDAP, secWinAD, secSAPR3 -->
<context-param>
<param-name>opendoc.authentication.default</param-name>
<param-value>secEnterprise</param-value>
</context-param>

Restarted the web server (tomcat) and change was in place. I did not change the setting for selecting authentication type as that could have been confusing for the users.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer on iPhone

Today, I came across an iPhone/iPad app for SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. It's available for free in iTunes. I decided to give it a shot on my iPhone and ended up liking it :).

It's just 1.9 MB in size and fast to launch unlike some of the other iPhone apps. It is preconfigured with three sample data sets being pulled from the SAP's demo server.

Please note that you will need an internet connection as there is no data available off-line on this app.

Now, let me take you through a series of screenshots to demonstrate how this app works.

Selecting one of the sample data sets.

A bar graph showing revenue by year.

In the above screenshot, following 5 options are available.

Option 1 - Tabular view
Option 2 - Top "n" records
Option 3 - Chart type (Vertical & horizontal bar charts, Radar chart, Pie chart, Line chart, Surface chart, Cloud chart and treemap chart.)
Option 4 - Add favorites
Option 5 - Email feature


A pie chart for revenue bye year and sending the same over an e-mail.

E-mail page.

Filtering the data only for years 2004, 2005 and 2006.

Pie chart only for years 2004, 2005 and 2006.

Drill down on year 2006 to get numbers by the quarters.

Revenue by quarter after drill down.

Search feature - Free text search on the data sets.

In addition, it can also fetch data sets/visualization from SAP BI OnDemand. I have my free Personal Edition account on http://bi.ondemand.com as mentioned in my earlier post. I pointed the app to my account and was able to download the data sets and visualization on the iPhone.

My sample data sets from BI OnDemand account.

Bar chart

Cloud chart.

The missing feature - support for portrait mode.  I think it should have been standard for BI apps. 

However, I think it's a great step by SAP towards its journey to On-Device. As iPhone is increasingly adopted in the enterprises and Sybase now in SAP's kitty, we can expect more such apps from SAP.

SAP SDN link - http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/boc/innovation-center?rid=/webcontent/uuid/706569f0-989c-2c10-5ca4-e945dc3368e3

Hands on with SAP BI OnDemand

SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand is a cloud based offering of BI solutions. I have mentioned about this in my earlier post. Today, just to get familiar, I tried few things.  I signed up for the BI OnDemand Personal Edition which is free.

I created data sets by uploading couple of spreadsheets viz. Customer_Data and Customers_Reservations.

Once data sets were available, I could explore the data using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. See the below screenshot.

Visualizations can be created by a single click from the Explorer window.

Finally, I put my demo visualizations on a single dashboard.