Connection to inSight for SAP R/3 

inSight for SAP R/3 is a special version of the PC application inSight, which is suitable for the presentation of data from various R/3 components. It offers an alternative to the SAP-GUI user interface for displaying drilldown reports.

inSight accesses an R/3 System online via an interface. The elements of the individual drilldown reports are then available in inSight. In inSight, you can drag-and-drop the elements of the drilldown report to design a new report. The inSight interface is then actively connected to R/3 using RFC (Remote Function Call). This ensures that both the users who access R/3 via inSight and those who work directly in drilldown reporting have access to the same figures.

Functions in inSight

In an inSight document you can display several drilldown lists and graphics at once, insert bitmaps and configure and position control elements such as radio buttons and push buttons as you like.

You can also use the inSight interface to present reports that use variables or master data hierarchies. You specify the variable or hierarchy when setting up the document in inSight. You can set conditions and change sort orders just as in drilldown reporting. If exceptions were defined in the drilldown report, the corresponding colors are displayed in inSight.

inSight is an ideal tool for the controller or management assistant because of the diversity of its functions. You can, for example, create quite a complex presentation or choose a specific selection of reports relevant to a manager’s area of responsibility. Managers can use inSight as a user interface. Using push buttons and radio buttons, they can call up further data, reports, lists, graphics and pictures. A document can also be created so that navigation through various levels is possible.

inSight for SAP is attractive to managers because it combines the business functionality of SAP R/3 with a convenient, user-friendly interface. There are various display options and you can configure the documents as you wish (see graphic: Drilldown Report in inSight).

Interface between R/3 and inSight

To display report data from R/3 in inSight, you must first log on to an R/3 system from inSight (see inSight for SAP R/3: Installation and Logging on). An index of the R/3 reports is then automatically created in the inSight developer mode and is displayed in the inSight database window. When you select a report with the mouse, the report definition is read from R/3 and the drilldown report is opened with RFC. All the necessary data for the report is read from the R/3 database when the report is opened. The data remains in R/3 however, and is transferred individually for each view in inSight. If you wish to display the data according to another characteristic value in inSight, the data is prepared in R/3 for this new selection and then sent to inSight.

Only a selection of drilldown reports are available in inSight. You can determine whether a report can be called up from inSight or not when you are creating or changing a report in R/3 (see Creating a Report).

If you want to display data from several SAP R/3 reports in inSight, then inSight logs on to R/3 several times. For each log on, the system uses the same details that you entered when you logged on first. You can also display report data from other systems in an inSight file. In this case, the logon box appears for each system that data is taken from.

The facility to simultaneously display data from more than one report in an inSight file is available only indirectly (by opening several parallel sessions in the same system). However, overuse of this facility can lead to an excessive load on the system and poorer response times. As a reference, the critical limit lies between 20 and 30 reports per inSight file.