Hello Everybody

This is my first blog in SDN and I would like to put down some of the limitation faced when I tried to use WEB INTELLIGENCE reporting in BI4.0 with the new connectivity option of directly using a BEX query using BICS option. I have used the .UNV universe in 3.x environment and below are some of the limitation immediately became visible  with BICS approach.

Very Important ones.

1>     BEX  built using a sub query technique:  In this case the when the “Allow External Access to this Query” is checked the Report can’t even executed in Bex( or bex web), therefore can’t be used in BOBJ platform.

2>     Slice and Dice of the dimension in the report most of the time requires refreshing of  the Report:  This is due to the inherent nature of the Data base delegated Measure setting in the Virtual universe generated at the back end during run time, and setting can’t be changed because of that. We probably have to live with this even if we don’t want the calculation of Key Figure to be done by BW for every slice and dice in WEBI.

3>     The following Filtering technique which works for .UNV universe , doesn’t work for BICS

a.       Object Base Filter ( Filter comparing the same dimension)

b.      Sub Query

c.       Feeding the Output of One query to Another

4>     Combined Query Technique( Minus, Union etc) –  The Option for this also doesn’t seem to be enabled

5>     Drilling - while I absolutely love the way the Hierarchy perform with the new BICS option, the Good Old drilling doesn’t work with BICS and I think this is huge

Some Other:

6>     Display Attribute defined in BEX with change of description of the field, ordering etc, has no bearing in the WEBI report. All display attribute defined in the Back end info Object level are available, and can be confusing for the General Users. This doesn’t necessarily be a defect but confusing for the end users , depending upon the type of end users.

7>     Due to inherent nature of BICS approach, we can’t do the following.. but I see this as more as a different way of doing things instead of limitation etc.

a.       Can’t have predefined filters as .UNV

b.      Can’t group dimension in logical group

Since I see WEBI as the most important Self service and Report authoring tool by Business rather than IT, these can cause some problem and pain points for use of WEBI down the line with BEX/BICS.

There are others smaller one, line query Stripping etc… Let’s see if you faced similar issues and have a healthy discussion about these.

Thanks

Arun

http://scn.sap.com/community/businessobjects-web-intelligence/blog/2012/06/14/some-limitation-in-web-intelligence-when-using-directly-with-bex-querybics-in-bi-40?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Hierarchy layout in WEBI XI3.1 does not come in the same way as in BEx query output.

We do have a drill function in WEBi which will drill the hirerchy from one level to another, but we cannot see all the levels of hierarchies when drilled as we see in the BEx query output.

FOLD/UNFOLD Function:

If we do not want to see the detailed rows in our report we can use the fold/unfold function.When table or break is folded the rows are collapsed and only the header and footers are displayed.

In WEBi XI3.1 we can make use of the FOLD/UNFOLD functionality to get the same hierarchy structure that we see when we run the BEx query.

Note: Tables must have header/footer to be folded and unfolded.

BEx query output:

Below are the steps to achive the same hierarchy layout as we have in BEx.

1) Drag all the level (L00,L01,L02 etc) of hierarchy and the required measures in the WEBi query.

2) Apply break on the dimension object (L00 and L01 dimension objects i.e. the first and second level of hierarchy as we have 3 levels in the current example) on which the hierarchy is to be created(break is not applied in the last level i.e. L02).

3) Drag the measure in the rows, the measure value will be summed up for L00 and L01, if not then sum the measures value at each break.

4) Enable the Fold/Unfold function as shown in the below figure.

As you can see that the measure value for L01 (India) is the 106 which is the sum of measure value for L01 (Maharashtra(6),Goa(68) and Punjab(32)). Similarly for L01 the measure value will be sum of the measure value for L02 object. We have the L00, L01 and L02 dimension objects draged in the report and have hidden the border of the columns to make the hierarchy structure look the same as we have in BEx.

Note: The above solution cannot be implemented if we have more then one hierarchy displayed in the report.

http://scn.sap.com/community/businessobjects-web-intelligence/blog/2012/05/04/hierarchy-in-webi-as-displayed-by-bex-query?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter