SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Manageme...

Former Member · ‎11-23-2015

SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management (FIM) and SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation (FC) are part of SAP Enterprise Performance Management platform, to provide financial consolidation and management reporting solution. SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management(FIM) is a wrapper application based on SAP BusinessObjects Data Services(DS). From now on, we use FIM to reference SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management application, FC to reference SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation application, DS to reference SAP BusinessObjects Data Services. This paper provides some technical guidelines on Web Service timeout configuration in the implementation of FIM/DS and FC solution.

FIM jobs are using FC web services calls to import package data or manual journal entry into FC. Web services are supposed to provide a simply and loose-coupling integration option between applications. In reality, it’s often the most complex component to implement in a FIM and FC integration environment. One of the most common issues is time out, especially when FIM server and FC server are installed in different servers, or different network subnets.

The paper is based on FIM V10.0 SP13, FC V10.0 SP16 and DS V4.2 SP4.

1. Native_Webservice_Call_Timeout_Miliseconds

Parameter Location: <DS_COMMON_DIR>\DSConfig.txt, e.g. C:\ ProgramData\SAP BusinessObjects\Data Services\conf\DSConfig.txt

The parameter controls the timeout period for a client waiting for the return of a web service call in milliseconds. The default value is 30,000 milliseconds, or 30 seconds.

If the parameter value is too small, below error will be generated by DS job:

14.2) 11-09-15 16:48:50 (E) (2152:4664) RUN-248005: |Data flow DF_LOAD_CMP10|Transform WScall-Function21

There is no response for the web service <ImportPackageData>. Ensure that the network, web server, and service are running properly. Also ensure that the service client call time out is set properly.eb server, and service are running properly. Also ensure that the service client call time out is set properly.

The default value, 30 seconds, only works for very small FC load. It’s a good idea to increase the value to a more reasonable value, e.g. 7200 seconds, in most cases.

In case you only want to adjust the timeout duration for an individual job, you can also use “socket timeout in milliseconds” parameter at the datastore level, which will be explained in the next section.

2. Socket timeout in milliseconds

Parameter location: Web service datastore property

It’s the equivalent of Native_Webservice_Call_Timeout_Miliseconds, controlling time out period of a web service call. But it’s at the web service datastore level. If it’s not set, Native_Webservice_Call_Timeout_Miliseconds value will be used. If it’s set, the set value will used, overriding the Native_Webservice_Call_Timeout_Miliseconds value.

3. monitorInterval and monitorRetries

Parameter location: C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Tomcat6\webapps\fim\WEB-INF\server.xml

When a FIM job is executed it will launch a monitoring thread to ping DS to get the status of the job. These two parameters, monitorInterval and monitorRetries, control the interval between pings and the number of times the thread will ping Data Services, e.g.

...

…

</bean>

By default, the values are set to 10 and 1800 respectively. Which means FIM will ping DS every 10 seconds up to 1800 times, a total of 5 hours. If a FIM job runs longer than 5 hours, before or during calling FC Web Services, you’ll obverse the following:

1) FIM Job ends with status unknown;
2) FC ctserver logs the below entries:

11-18-15 16:23:03 PID=5032 THD=1320 USR= MSG=0 WARN security.authentication - Failed to validate Business Objects Enterprise serialized session: Session ID is not valid. (FWB 00011)

11-18-15 16:23:03 PID=5032 THD=1320 USR= MSG=0 WARN security.authentication - Invalid security token.

11-18-15 16:23:03 PID=5032 THD=1320 USR= MSG=0 WARN business - Service request authentication failed.

3) Data Services Job completes without any error.

Depend on the actual execution time of the FIM job, we can increase either monitorInterval or monitorRetries, so that total monitoring interval will be able to cover the whole execution duration.

4. receiveTimeout

Parameter location: C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Tomcat6\webapps\fim\WEB-INF\server.xml

While FIM is calling FC web services to load data into FC, FIM is also calling Data Services web service to start and monitor DS jobs. FIM can time-out when DS job server doesn’t response in time. receiveTimeout is designed to provide some tolerance for the communication delay between FIM and DS. Below is an excerpt from FIM 10 Administration Guide.

receiveTimeout: Timeout in milliseconds to receive result from Data Services execution Web Service. (Default 300 000 milliseconds)

The author noticed that receiveTimeout is set to 600 in FIM V10 SP13 installation. There is another parameter, connectionTimeout, mentioned in FIM 10 Administration Guide, but it doesn’t exist in default server.xml file. The default receiveTimeout value, 600 seconds, should be enough for any normal operating environment. If in some rare cases, DS execution Web Service took long time to response, FIM job would show failed status even the corresponding DS job completed successfully in the end.