Analytical data is relevant for more and more users. In more use-cases and more frequent. Integration of transactional with analytical data is result of this trend as is the demand for mobile analytics. SAP NetWeaver BW is an excellent source of high quality analytical data. Just it offered only a MDX interface for external consumption so far. Which is great if you intend to do real analytics with high flexibility, but it is quite sophisticated if you just want to display some reporting values.
That is what ‘Easy query’ was designed for – for simplicity and ease of consumption. And it really is easy - actually it is just a flag. At least that’s what you need to deal with, the rest is done by the system: Choose or define yourself a query in BEX Query Designer. On query level you define it as ‘Easy Query’ next to where you expose it for ODBO:
Upon save the system checks some constraints that apply for ‘Easy Queries’, like Key-figures are on x-axis, characteristics on the y-axis, only single value variables etc. (see documentation for details).
With saving the query, your job is done. The system responds a message about the generation of the typed backend stub for this ‘Easy query’. And, by the way, this setting is integrated into the transport logistics of the query, so that every ‘Easy query’ will trigger the generation of the backend stub upon import into a system.
To see what happens behind the scenes, let us look into the backend. Here the new transaction EQMANAGER allows managing all ‘Easy queries’. You can monitor generation processes, force generation and map the generated objects to the ‘Easy queries’:
It is also possible to test such generated stub:
You surely agree that this was very easy. But you might wonder about the benefit, still. I would say this is almost up to your imagination. With this one flag the system generates a remote enabled ABAP function, a SOAP service and an ODATA service. It is your choice which technology fits best the needs of your project:
To give you an idea how easy also the consumption side can be, we provide how-to examples for different consumption scenarios:
- ABAP WebDynpro consumption
- SOAP consumption
- ODATA consumption
'Easy query' is available with SAP NetWeaver BW 7.30 SP5 and BEx Query Designer 7.20 revision 672.
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