Scheduling SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Microsoft Office Workbooks

Tested on SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 SP1 

Some weeks ago SAP released the Analysis Office BIP Add On 1.4, which makes it possible to schedule and broadcast an Analysis for Office Workbook using the BI platform. It still hast several restrictions (e.g. prompts are not supported) but for simple tasks it can already be used.

To my mind the setup process is not well documented, so I want to mention the most important steps.

At first you have to download the latest version of "Analysis Office BIP Add On 1.4" from the Service marketplace.(http://service.sap.com/swdc)

Install this add-on on all your BO-nodes.

Afterwards open your CMC, go to the Server section and find your Job Server under the Core Services section. You have to stop the Job Server to add the "Analysis Office Schedule Service" to it (Select Services).

Open the properties of the Job Server and scroll down to the Analysis Office Schedule Service section. Add the path “Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\Analysis Precalculation\BiPrecalculation.exe” (change the path to your BO installation directory) into the Precalculation text box.
Now you can start your Job Server again.

On your client PC of course you must have installed the Analysis for Excel Add-In for Office. It's important to use the latest version (e.g. 1.4.5 in my case), otherwise you can't export Analysis Workbooks to your BO platform.

Upload your Excel Workbook to your BO platform by using the option in the Analysis section of your File menu in Excel. You will see that your Excel Workbook is converted to an Analysis Workbook file on your platform.

When you right click on that object, you will see the Schedule option which is straight forward to setup.

One restriction at the moment is also, that you just can control your instances in the CMC. In Launch Pad there is no History-option like we know it from other objects.

In CMC, open the Instance Manager-section and search for Analysis Workbooks to monitor your scheduling processes.

SAP BusinessObjects SSO: "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage"

SAP BusinessObjects 4.0/4.1 Single Sign On

On our BI platform we had the problem that Windows AD SSO didn't work for some specific users, they just saw the error message "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" when trying to access Launch Pad.

After some research we found out that those users are members in a very large number of Windows AD groups, which are sent in the HTTP header when using Sindle Sign On.

The first step to fix that is well documented in the SAP guides.

You have to include the maxHttpHeaderSize="65536" in the 8080 Connector Port tag of your  E:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\Tomcat6\conf\server.xml-  file.

But there might be another configuration necessary too. There is the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\Kerberos\Parameters\MaxTokenSize" - parameter in the Windows registry, which must be set on every involved client - so this should be done via group policy. 

If the max. token size is still too small, you should reduce the number of groups.

Analysis for Office timeout issues (HTTP request unouthorized)

SAP BusinessObjects 4.0/4.1 Analysis for Office 1.4

If you try to connect to a new data source and you notice after an inactivity time of 30 minutes the following error message, you may have to increase the timeout parameter in your web.xml file of your dswsbobje-service.

- Error: General .NET Exception: 
The HTTP request is unauthorized with client authentication scheme 'Anonymous'. The authentication header received from the server was 'Negotiate'.The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized. 

>> General .NET Exception: 
System received an expired SSO ticket 
at SAP.Middleware.Connector.RfcConnection.ThrowRfcErrorMsg() 
at SAP.Middleware.Connector.RfcConnection.ReadBytes(Byte* buffer, Int32 count) 
at SAP.Middleware.Connector.RfcConnection.ReadRfcIDBegin(Int32& length) 
at SAP.Middleware.Connector.RfcConnection.ReadUpTo(RFCGET readState, RfcFunction function, RFCID toRid) 
at SAP.Middleware.Connector.RfcConnection.RfcReceive(RfcFunction function) 
at SAP.Middleware.Connector.RfcConnection.ConnectAsClient(RfcDestination destination, Boolean forRepository)

It's is quite common and well documented to increase the timeout value for Launch Pad, but you can do this also for the dswsbobje-service to overcome that error.

To do that, open your web.xml-file (\SAP BusinessObjects\tomcat\webapps\dswsbobje\WEB-INF) and add the following lines inside the web-app-tag to increase the timeout parameter to 120 minutes in this example.

    <session-config>
        <session-timeout>120</session-timeout>
    </session-config>

Restart your Tomcat-Service.

SAP BO Training Recommendation

I made really bad experiences with the SAP BO Online Training Courses. They are quite expensive and you waste too much time when a computer voice explains you how to use the scroll bar (I am not joking) in your browser or how to create a new folder in Launch Pad or when you have to watch again and again how to enter the BO System name in a textbox in the training videos.

If you don't know this site yet, check it out, I can fully recommend it and the best thing it is free: https://open.sap.com/

You can participate in different weekly-based only courses, which are really well made. The whole material can be downloaded and at the end you can make a small test.

Good luck!

Web Intelligence 4.0 Rich Client - "login failed"

Still a quite common error in WebI 4.0 Rich Client only

SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 - Web Intelligence Rich Client

It can happen after some time that you get a "login failed" message when you try to login with Web Intelligence 4.0 Rich Client (in Launchpad it works). This is due to a corrupted LSI (Local Security Information) file.

To fix that problem, open the folder

"C:\Users\[MyUsername]\Documents\My SAP BusinessObjects Documents\LocData"

on your client computer. Delete the "*.lsi"-files in the LocaData folder (or move them to another directory for backup).

Try to login again in WebI 4.0 Rich Client.

SAP BO 4.0 is still too buggy for productive use

After days of recreating a whole report I am angry, furious, I am so tired of creating reports with WebI 4.0 and I have to write this to get it off my chest

SAP BusinessObjects 4.0

I am using SAP BO 4.0 and especially WebI 4.0 for almost 1 year now and have to say that it's still too buggy for a productive use. It's incredible how much time I need for creating and maintaining simple WebI reports and I am so tired of explaining my client why I need days for reformatting a simple report.

And yes we are using always the latest patches. I can't understand what SAP is doing with BO, which I really liked in the past, but now i can't recommend it to my clients anymore. The software engineering team is fixing bugs and new bugs appear, some bugs are so obvious, I must assume that they are not testing their software at all.

At the first sight BO 4.0 includes many new and fancy features, but once you are really working with it as an engineer, you will find out that the whole application is unbelievable inefficient.

This is just a small list of things I am fighting with every single working day:

• when I want to change the size of the cells in a table the size is not set correctly
• adding a dimension to a merged dimension forced me to unmerge the dimension and recreate a part of my entire report
• publications fail for unknown reasons (support couldn't help)
• data sources can't be changed any more of some reports
• entire reports got corrupted and have to be recreated
• very slow design mode
• section property "hide when empty" just doesn't work sometimes
• IE 10 is not really working with WebI even when they say
• BO User Variable was not working anymore in Rich Client since SP 6
• Report tabs can't be renamed anymore
• Report filters are not passed to blocks sometimes
• Desktop gets spammed with log files from WebI Java version
• dimension loses sortings after adding a query
• the promoted feature to copy report parts to another report is not useable at all
• features from rich client are missing in the web version
• using multiple webi instances at the same time lead to problems with the queries
• frequently appearing error message like getpages, processcommand, Index: 0 Size: 0, etc. are totally normal
• table cells with measure inside are empty - entire table has to be recreated to get it working
• the whole platform is so unstable
• etc.

The really bad thing is, that I was also using the new Crystal Reports for Enterprise and Dashboards (former XCelsius) and there I see the same buggy and unstable behaviour. The support team couldn't help us with most of the problems we had and the reaction time was quite slow.

Instead of adding new features to the BO tools, I would suggest to make the existing features useable and to add at least the features from the previous BO version 3.1, which is many years ago now.

I still hope that version 4.1 brings massive enhancements.

Please share your experiences with 4.0!

No diagrams in WebI (and publication)

No diagrams in WebI (and publication)

BusinessObjects 4.0 Web Intelligence

Instead of the diagrams just an empty space appears in your report

I created a publication, that ran about 1 hour and sent quite complex reports to some recipients. Sometimes the reports (in my case the format was pdf) contained no diagrams. The publication didn't show any error, it ended with status "successful".

In my logs I could find the error

ERROR:repeng:Created xblock instance is UNVALID

To solve that issue I had to increase the following two parameters of my Visualization service:

• Visualization Engine cleanup timeout(in seconds)
• Visualization engine swap timeout(in seconds)

After restarting the Visualization services, the problem was solved.