SAP Business Warehouse extractor and table analyzer

Building up a new dataflow can be very time-consuming, mainly when there is no data acquisition layer to extract data from. Setting up a proper data acquisition layer means considering which fields to extract towards the data warehouse system. Since not all fields of a table used in the source system it is advisable to first analyze which fields are useful. Extracting all fields results in empty and unused objects in the Data Warehouse system, which technically results in a bigger database.

In order to make everybody’s life easier I created the ABAP program “SAP Business Warehouse extractor and table analyzer”. This program can be used to analyze Business Content extractors (like 2LIS structures) or SAP tables.
SAP Business Warehouse extractor and table analyzer

Suppress Bex Broadcaster email footer

Per default an email footer is attached to every email which is send by the SAP BW system via the Bex Broadcaster. This footer contains a reference to the SAP portal. In some cases this footer is not applicable, for e.g. when an customer is not using the Bex Web Analyzer to execute reports. To prevent end users to get confused by seeing this footer it is necessary to disable it.
Suppress Bex Broadcaster email footer
This footer can be disabled by execution transaction code RSCUSTV29 and enabling the option suppress footer. Once done the footer message will magically disappear.
Suppress Bex Broadcaster email footer transaction RSCUSTV29
Some other (customizing) transactions related to the Bex Broadcaster functionality are mentioned in the table below.

SAP transaction code Description
RSRD_LOG Broadcaster application log
RSRD_ADMIN Broadcasting administration
RSRD_START Start broadcaster for test purposes
CRMC_CIC_BROAD IC WinClient broadcast profile
RSPRECADMIN BW Excel workbook precalculation server admini
RSCUSTV29 Settings for Web Template
RSRD_REPLACE Restart broadcasting for log number

Bex Broadcaster dynamic variables

A couple of weeks ago I got a question from a sales analyst asking if it’s possible to automatically send out workbooks. Every morning the sales analyst is waiting for output of multiple workbooks. This consumes a lot of time. I responded that for this purpose SAP has a standard functionality available in the form of the Bex Broadcaster, but that I needed some time to setup the infrastructure and testing it.

If you have already worked with the Bex Broadcaster you probably know that scheduling queries can be used out of the box, without any additional server. However if you want to schedule workbooks you will need a precalculation server (which is actually a Windows computer with Excel and the precalculation service installed). Since the sales analyst is using workbooks with more than 35 queries in it (we are not talking about efficiency here), this additional precalculation server is required. All steps to setup this server are mentioned in this post on SCN.

During the testing phase scheduling a simple workbook worked straight out of the box (that’s a good thing!). Second test was executing the workbook consisting out 35 (!) queries. Believe it or not, this also worked. The only downside of scheduling this workbook, is that the variables which are assigned to the underlying queries were fixed values. This is a disadvantage because the workbook is refreshed every day based on the current calendar day. One option I considered in order to solve this, is to redesign the complete workbook (including the queries). This will take a lot of time, thus I started searching on Google and SCN, resulting in viewing this post. There someone explains how workbook variables can be changed dynamically by using a program he created. My quest was finished! We will use this program to manipulate Bex Broadcaster variables.

ABAP program to change Bex User Template

At one of my projects most of the end-users are still used to the old 3.x Bex Analyzer. Whereas the 3.x version works primarily with workbooks the new 7.x analyzer one is able to open queries as well. When a query is opened in the new 7.x Analyzer a standard template is being used to display the data. This template, supplied by SAP, contains alot of custom visual basic code to make interaction in the report possible (like showing a graph). This custom Visual Basic code raises a lot of performance issues, especially when users are working on a Citrix environment.