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Former Member
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With SAP BW 7.4 SP5 onwards, SAP has made available a very useful feature of automatic HANA views generation for BW objects. As of now, supported BW objects are SAP HANA-optimized InfoCubes, DataStore objects, InfoObjects, queries as InfoProviders, CompositeProviders, local CompositeProviders in the BW Workspace and queries. In this document, we would focus mainly on DSO & Info object – Characteristics.

Before this feature was made available, we had to manually import the analytical views of DSO’s in HANA native system. Whenever there are changes in DSO structure (like addition or removal of fields), utmost care needs to be taken that corresponding analytical views should also get imported across the landscape as DSO are being imported. If these manual imports of analytical views are missed & corresponding DSO structure changes are imported then it makes the corresponding analytical views inactive thereby impacting the reporting on those views. Hence this new feature introduced by SAP with BW7.4 SP5 onwards is very useful to avoid above mentioned inconsistencies as these generated SAP HANA views are part of the BW InfoProvider lifecycle meaning they are transported with the corresponding BW objects.

Let us now go into the details as to how to enable this feature. We will take DSO & Info object – Characteristics as examples.

  • Data store Object (DSO): A new checkbox is made available under the settings “External SAP HANA view for reporting”. If this flag is set accordingly, an external SAP HANA analytical view is generated automatically with the activation of DSO.

  • Characteristic: A new checkbox is made available under the Master Data/Texts tab “External SAP HANA view for reporting”. If this flag is set accordingly, an external SAP HANA attribute view is generated automatically with the activation of this Info object.

It is also important to understand in which HANA content packages these automatically generated Analytical / attribute views would get saved. These HANA content package settings can be defined in SPRO as shown below

Based on these settings, generated HANA views would get saved as shown below

Note that under the BW transaction: RSRV (Analysis & Repair of BW Objects), a new option is also made available to check consistencies of external HANA views.

There are also some limitations of this feature as not all BW objects properties can be added to the generated SAP HANA view.

The following restrictions apply:

·       Navigation attributes of Info Objects, which do not have “standard” as their master data access type, are not supported.

If the navigation attribute is also authorization-relevant, it is not possible to generate an SAP HANA view.

·       Texts for Info Objects, which do not have “standard” as their master data access type, are not visible.

·       The setting for the text type in the Info Object definition specifies which of the text fields is used in the external SAP HANA view.

·       Non-cumulative numbers are only supported in the SAP HANA view for queries.

·       Key figures, for which the aggregation is set to “No Aggregation”, are not supported.

·       Compounding is not supported: There is no attribute in the SAP HANA view, which represents the chained value of an Info Object with compounding.

·       Date conversion and alpha conversion are not supported.

·       BW hierarchies are not available in an SAP HANA view.

·       Key figures of data type date or time are not supported with aggregation SUM.

·       Characteristics with property “attribute only” are not supported.

·       Non-cumulative range key figures are not available in an SAP HANA view.

Reference:

http://help.sap.com

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