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.

BusinessObjects: Public Folder doesn't open in Launch Pad

When you try to open the Public Folder in Launch Pad and it doesn't expand

BusinessObjects 4.0 LaunchPad

I didn't find a real solution for that problem on the internet, so I want to share how to solve it here. In my case it happened on a BO 4.0 platform but may be valid for other versions as well.

When I tried to open the Public Folder in Launch Pad, I just saw the waiting symbol, but it didn't open.

It was a long way to find out that that problem is related to the language settings of the installation. One quick workaround for the problem would be to change the language settings of your browser by adding the language of your BO installation in your settings and rank it to the highest position.

In my case I had to add the English language to my Language Preferences as you can see in the screenshot.

But of course that's just a quick workaround, that can be done from the client.

To solve the problem I had to look into the language directory of the BO installation. I found there two files for crystalreports: one for german (DE) and one for english (EN). I had to delete the german one to have consistent language files in the directory. After restarting tomcat the public folder should show up.

WebI: Report Filter not working

If you use a report filter in Web Intelligence and no data is shown, although it matches the filter condition

SAP BusinessObjects WebIntelligence - all versions

The problem might be that your text contains invisible special characters like new line. These characters are not working with report filters, you don't get any data in that case.

I remove those special characters in the database layer/semantic layer and replace them with a space (' ') - character. For Oracle Databases your SQL statement could look like this:


REPLACE (
             REPLACE (REPLACE (description, CHR (10), ' '),
                      CHR (13),
                      ' '),
             '   ',
             ' ')
             AS description

WebI: Show all months whether they have data

Sometimes you want to display all values of a dimension in your report, even when there is no data inside

SAP BusinessObjects WebIntelligence - all versions

In WebI you can of course only show the data, that you retrieve from your query. That means, when you want to display your measures based on months in a diagram, you will see only the months on your x-axis you get from your query.

Because that doesn't look very nice, I use the following very simple method to always show all 12 months of a year.

I create a new query in the query panel with two simple dimensions inside: YEAR, MONTH.

Afterwards you can merge those dimensions from the Query 'Date' with the YEAR and MONTH dimensions from your original query. When you use the merged dimension in your report, it will always show all 12 monnths.

Crystal Reports 2008: Dimension returns only "Selektion X" descriptions

Why a SAP BW dimension shows only Selektion X - placeholder descriptions instead of the correct dimension values.

SAP BusinessObjects 3.1, Crystal Reports 2008, BusinessObjects Integration Kit for SAP, BEX Query

It took me days to solve the following problem, so I want to share a solution if someone else has the same issue.

In my case the problem occurred, when I wanted to access with Crystal Reports 2008 via the BusinessObjects Integration Kit for SAP a BEX Query using a SAP BW MDX Query-Connection. When I used the query objects in my report, instead of the actual dimension member descriptions, I just got the placeholder-descriptions “Selektion 1”, “Selektion 2”, etc. When I opened the same query in SAP, it showed the correct values.

When I looked at the connection string Crystal Reports was using, I saw the parameter “LANG: DE” therein, which means, that it tried to query a german version of the dimension values. As there was only an english version defined, it returned those “Selektion X” descriptions.

I could not find out how to change that language-parameter directly. But finally I found the configuration file "DefaultMapping.properties“ in the folder “PVLMapping” of the Integration Kit for SAP. There you can define a mapping between system language codes to SAP language codes. I mapped the german language codes to english SAP language codes (de=EN, etc.), which changed the LANG-parameter in the connection string to “LANG:EN” and made the correct dimension decscriptions appear.

Set Line Color in Web Intelligence 4.0 Chart

How to individually specify the color of data series in a Web Intelligence 4.0 chart.

SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 FP3

In FP3 SAP added an urgently needed feature to Web Intelligence 4.0 charts. It is now possible to change the color of the lines not just according to a predefined color schema. To my mind that new feature is well hidden in the Web Intelligence 4.0 user interface.

You don't find it in the property window of the chart. Instead you have to select the data series in the chart legend or the line itself. Then you can change the color by chosing the background color in the Format-tab.

Change Universe in SAP BusinessObjects 3.1

"Some objects are no longer available in the universe. See your BusinessObjects administrator. (Error: WIS00001)(Error: INF)"

SAP BusinessObjects 3.1

When you want to replace the universe, which is used in a Web Intelligence report by a new universe, you might get the error message "Some objects are no longer available in the universe. See your BusinessObjects administrator. (Error: WIS00001)(Error: INF)" even when all the dimensions and measures definitely exist in the new universe.
The reason is, that sometimes Web Intelligence doesn't use the object names to reference dimensions and measures of a universe, but it's own internal object ids. These object ids are not visible for the user, but when creating a new object in the universe, a new object id is created automatically.
To overcome the error in Web Intelligence after changing the universe, the only solution I have found is not to recreate the objects in the new universe, but to use the existing universe with the existing object ids and replace the SQL query in the properties. This way the object ids remain and the Web Intelligence report can reference the objects correctly.

QaaWS and web tier architecture

Connection problems using QaaWS in a web tier architecture

SAP Business Objects XI 3.1

In a recent project it took me some days to get QaaWS working in a BO web tier architecture. I didn't find enough information on the internet, so I want to share my experiences here. The idea was to publish a Query as a Web Service on the Webserver, which gets the data from a database connection stored on the BO Server. A public Xcelsius flash object can then access the data via Web Service.

Our web tier architecture consists of

• 1 BO Server (CMS, Repository)
• 1 Web Server (Tomcat 5.5) - exposed to the internet

In retrospect there were three main points I had to consider to finally get Xcelsius via QaaWS and web tier architecture working:

Assign ports

To get the connection between the BO Server and Web Server working when using a firewall you have to manually assign port numbers to the 'Request Port' in your CMC for all necessary BO services. Uncheck the Auto assign box and enter a free port number. If you don't do that, the services would pick different random port numbers. Enter for your CMS request port 6401 for example and don't forget to assign to the other servers a port number, if you need them (Webi processing server, etc.)

After that you can open those ports on your firewall. The Web Server should now communicate with the BO Server.

Adjust dsws.properties

If your QaaWS still doesn't provide any data, you probably have to add your CMS server name to the dsws.properties configuration file. To my mind that's a bug, because I already entered the name of the CMS Server when I did the web tier installation and the connection works, but it does not when using QaaWS. Dswsbobje is looking for the CMS on the Web Server and of course can't find it. So open your dsws.properties file and just add/change the line

domain=Server:port (e.g. domain=BOXI31:6400)

Restart your Web Server. Now also QaaWS (the dswsbobje application) knows where your CMS is.

Add crossdomain.xml

Another prerequisite when accessing data external with flash is that you need crossdomain.xml file in your webapps-root directory (error codes: #2170 or #2048) . Therefore you find lots of information on the internet (e.g. here or here). Just add a text file with the file name 'crossdomain.xml' to the ROOT folder of your web server (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Business Objects\Tomcat55\webapps\ROOT) with the following content:

<?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>

Restart your Web Server. Try to open your flash object again.