As part of the BI Expert teams for the "Dear aBI" gives advice on Business Intelligence, here another set of answers to some of the questions that have been put forward..
Missy from Oklahoma is asking the following question:
Platform: BI 7 and Crystal XIR2
Patches just upgraded to:
SAP ERP 6.0 -- Enhancement Pack 4 Stack 5
SAP SCM 2005 -- Stack 16
SAP SRM 2005 -- Stack 15
SAP Netweaver 7.0 -- Enhancement Pack 1 Stack 5
PI 7.1 - Stack 9
Issue:
After the above patches were put into play I had an issue some Crystal reports tied to BI queries. Upon investigation I found that when using the MDX driver, SAP BW MDX Query, I was unable to see the BI query that was used to create the Crystal report. I tried to create a new report using the same MDX driver, expanded the queries and several of the queries that were availabe before were gone from the list. I went into BI directly and ran MDXTEST and when I chose the catalog the queries were connected with I again could not see the all the queries that should be there. There were queries but not all of them, so therefore my Crystal reports will not run. The MDX transports were reapplied but to no avail. Any suggestions?"
When using Crystal Reports in combination with SAP NetWeaver BW queries you can leverage two main menu options to connect Crystal Reports to the correct BEx query.
Option 1: Using the SAP Toolbar.
After you installed the SAP Toolbar as part of the SAP BusinessObjects Integration for SAP solutions you should see the menu SAP and a SAP specific SAP Toolbar. when using the SAP menu you can use the menu item "Settings" to configure the SAP toolbar to always use the BW MDX Driver and there is no specific task.
Option 2 : Using the menu File > New
In case you prefer to use the menu option File > New and use the standard Crystal Reports option then the BEx queries are available as part of the database connection "BW MDX Driver" but for this connection to work it is important that the queries are released for external access which is a query property and needs to be set in the BEx query designer.
To me it sounds like you are using Option 2 and you should check the property for allowing the external access as part of the Query Designer.
In addition Gabriel from Sydney is asking the following:
Dear aBI,
We have built webi reports on top of Bex queries, and the user would like to personnalize the values of the prompt screen (for example, I am a Sales Manager, and I don't want to have to select my region every time I run the report so I define the region only the first time I run the report). Is there a way to provide this functionnality (without having to save the webi report for each user).
Thank you,Gabriel
Now, even though the answer will be short I thought it is important to provide the answer.
Gabriel, sorry to say but Web Intelligence does not support Variable Personalization right now as you know variable personalization from tools like BEx Analyzer. The only option I see right now to provide a similar workflow would be to create an EXIT variable which would provide value fors the variable based on the user who logged on. Not 100% if something like that would be "easy to do" but that is the only scenario I can see working right now.
I hope that I provided good answers for both set of questions and for those that are interested in getting answers to their questions, then take a look here and learn more about the Dear BI initiative of the SAP BusinessObjects community.
