Tab Page: General
On this tab page, you define the basic properties of the characteristic.
Specify the Data Type and the Data Length. The system provides selection options in F4 input help.
The following data types are supported for characteristics:
Char: |
Numbers and letters |
Character length 1 - 250 |
Numc: |
Numbers only |
Character length 1 - 69 |
Dats: |
Date |
Character length 8 |
Tims: |
Time |
Character length 6 |
Lowercase Letters Allowed/Not Allowed
If this flag is set, the system differentiates between lowercase letters and uppercase letters if a screen template is used to enter values. If it is not set, the system converts all the letters into uppercase letters if a screen template is used to enter values. No conversion occurs during the load process or during transformation. This means that values with lowercase letters cannot be posted to an InfoObject that does not allow lowercase letters.
If you allow lowercase letters, be aware of the system response when you enter variables:
If you want to use the characteristic in variables, the system is only able to find the values for the characteristic if the lowercase letters and the uppercase letters are typed in accurately on the input screen for variables. If you do not allow the use of lowercase letters, any characters that you type in the variable screen are converted automatically into uppercase letters.
Conversion Routine
The standard conversion for the characteristic is displayed. If this standard conversion is not right for you, you can override it by specifying a conversion routine in the underlying domain. See Conversion Routines in BW Systems.
High Cardinality
You can only use this function if you are using a SAP HANA database.
The High Cardinality property allows you to create more than two thousand million characteristic attributes for a characteristic. As a characteristic with high cardinality has a number of restrictions, you should only set this property if you really expect a larger number of characteristic attributes.
A characteristic with high cardinality has no persistent SID values and no SID table. This kind of characteristic can therefore only be used in InfoProviders that store the key instead of the SID value of the characteristics it contains.Restrictions:
Characteristics with high cardinality cannot
- be used in InfoCubes
- be used as compound parents in a compound
- be used as navigation attributes
- be used in hierarchies
The High Cardinality property is only supported for data types CHAR and NUMC with a length of >= 10.
During reporting, the SID values are created dynamically as local SIDs. This can result in longer query reply times.
Attribute Only
If you select Attribute Only, the characteristic created can be used only as a display attribute for another characteristic, not as a navigation attribute. You cannot add the characteristic to InfoCubes either, although you can use it in DataStore objects or InfoSets.
Characteristic is Document Property
You can allow the characteristic to be used as a Document Property. This enables you to assign a comment (this can be any document) to a combination of characteristic values. See Documents and the example for
Characteristic is Document Property.
Since it makes little sense to use this comment function for all characteristics, you need to explicitly flag the characteristics that you want to appear in comments.
If you set this flag, the system generates a property (attribute) for this characteristic in the meta model of the document management system. For technical reasons, this property (attribute) has to be written to a (dummy) transport request (the appropriate dialog box appears) but it is not actually transported.
Constant
By assigning a Constant to a characteristic, you give it a fixed value. The characteristic then exists on the database (for verifications for example) but does not appear in reporting. Assigning a constant is mainly of use when working with compound characteristics.
The Storage Location characteristic is compounded with the Plant characteristic. If just one plant is always used in the application, a constant can be assigned to this plant. Validation against the storage location master table should then be performed using this value for the plant. In the query, the storage location only appears as a characteristic however.
Exception:
If you want to assign constant SPACE (type CHAR) or 00..0 (type NUMC) to the characteristic, enter # in the first position.
When you create a transfer routine, it is valid globally for the characteristic and is included in all the transformation rules that contain the InfoObject. The transfer routine is only executed in one transformation however, with a DataSource as the source. The transfer routine is used to correct data before it is updated in the characteristic.
During data transfer, the logic stored in the individual transformation rule is executed first. The transfer routine for the value of the corresponding field is then executed for each InfoObject that has a transfer routine.
The transfer routine can therefore store InfoObject-dependent coding that only needs to be maintained once and is then valid for all transformation rules.