DataSources for BI Extractor Operations of Application Services

Use

CAF provides a DataSource for each application service operation that is marked as SAP BW Extractor. Each time an extract request is initiated from SAP BW this method is called with the corresponding parameters and the result is returned to SAP BW. The signature of this operation always returns a collection of a particular CAF structure and the SAP BW DataSource provided by CAF represents this structure. For most structure attributes there is a field in the DataSource. Attributes of the following types are not part of the DataSource:

• BASE64BINARY
• HEXBINARY
• String attributes with length greater than 255
• Complex attributes and attributes with cardinality > 1

For attributes of type DATETIME, CAF defines three fields in the DataSource:

• DATE
• TIME
• BIGINT (containing the time in milliseconds)

Example

You want to extract in SAP BW only those teachers who do not have subjects assigned to them. For this purpose we create an application service TeacherService . We add to this service SAP BW extractor operation, called extractTeachersWithoutSubjects ,which returns a collection of a structure Teacher with the following attributes:

E41)

DataSource name: E41extractTeachersWithoutSubje