Unification with SAP R/3 and BW 

Purpose

In the NetWeaver ’04 portal, unification enables the creation of iViews, with Drag&Relate capabilities, based on business objects from R/3 and BW systems. Navigation among these iViews based on objects from these systems return business information to users with the relevant roles.

The purpose of this section is to provide a workflow for creating iViews in the NetWeaver portal over SAP R/3 and BW applications.

Prerequisites

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·        Both R/3 and BW require preparation in the application at the back end for working with portal Drag&Relate technology.

¡        For R/3, refer to the following documentation: Drag&Relate with SAP R/3 Systems and Drag&Relate and the Business Object Repository.

The current plug-in, which must be installed to work with the portal, is found at service.sap.com ® Software Distribution Center ® Download ® SAP Installations and Upgrades ® SAPNetweaver ® SAP Enterprise Portal ® Enterprise Portal Plug-In ® WP-PI.

Select the plug-in WP-PI 600_<your_basis_release>. Find out your basis release in R/3 by choosing System ® Status and check the release of component SAP_BASIS.

¡        For BW, go to the SAP help portal at help.sap.com ® SAP NetWeaver ® Information Integration ® SAP Business Information Warehouse ® BI Suite: Business Explorer ® Integration with SAP Enterprise Portal ® Drag&Relate with the SAP Unifier for SAP BW.

Additionally, in order to work with BW business content objects in general, those objects must activated in BW. For detailed information, navigate as above to SAP NetWeaver ® Information Integration ® SAP Business Information Warehouse ® Data Warehousing ® Data Warehouse Management ® Business Content (Versions ®  Installing Business Content.

·        In the portal, systems must be created to represent the back-end applications.

For detailed information on creating systems and editing system properties, see Running the System Landscape Wizard.

Also see, Editing SAP R/3 System Properties. System properties for BW are related to here as well.

Process Flow

Once the prerequisites have been fulfilled, it is possible to create iView over the SAP systems in two ways:

·        By migrating roles from the SAP system using the role upload utility of the portal

·        By creating individual iViews using the iView wizard framework and entering required information manually

Creating iViews by Uploading Roles

Uploading roles from the SAP applications is the simplest way to create iViews over the R/3 and BW systems. The role uploader imports roles and their users from R/3 or BW. and uses the portal main object service to create iViews.

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       1.      The role uploader creates iView over each R/3 transactions or BW Reports. You can select the specific transactions, queries, or miniapps for which iViews are to be created.

       2.      The uploader calls the main object service, which configures the iViews for Drag&Relate.

       3.      The iViews are mapped to roles; the roles are mapped to users, if desired.

       4.      The iViews are stored in the Migrated Content folder in the Port Content Catalog.

You can now assign roles, with their associated content, to users, if you have not chosen to do so automatically.

For automatic user mapping to take place, the back-end application users must match existing portal users. If your user authentication is ticket-based, no further action is required. On the other hand, if it is by means of user mapping, then each back-end and portal user must be mapped to each other.

The role uploader is accessed by navigating in the portal as follows: System Administration ® Transport ® Role Upload.

For detailed information about uploading roles, see the How-To guide Uploading Roles from ABAP-based Systems by going to service.sap.com/ep60 ® Documentation & More ® How-To Guides ® Current How-To Guides.

Workflow for Creating Individual iViews

Although it is simpler to create iViews by means of performing a role upload, it may still be necessary at times to create individual iView over SAP applications individually, and it important that the content administrator be aware of the various attributes involved with Drag&Relate.

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       1.      Create iViews in the portal by using the wizard framework. You can also create iViews based on an existing PAR file.

The templates to choose from the iView wizard are:

¡        SAPTransaction iView for R/3

¡        SAP BW Report iView for BW

For the BW Report iView, you must enter a value for the BEX Web Application Query String. This information is obtained from the back-end application. In BW documentation, see the section on Displaying Content from SAP BW in the Enterprise Portal using the documentation path described in the prerequisites above.

At the end of the BEX Web Application Query String, you must add the parameter &show_dr_links=X, in order to include Drag&Relate links in the iViews. For more information, see Setting and Prerequisites for Drag&Relate using the documentation path described in the prerequisites above.

For detailed information about creating iViews in the portal, using the wizard framework, see Creating iViews over Enterprise Applications and Databases.

       2.      Once the iView is created, go to the iView Property Editor and choose the Drag&Relate category. For Drag&Relate to work in the portal, values for two properties must be completed, Main Object, and the Drag&Relate Target value must to set to ‘1’.

For the Main Object property, all the relevant objects for the iView must have been imported by the Business Object Importer into Business Object folder of the Portal Content Catalog.

If this import is not done, the iView will not be Drag&Relate-enabled, even if all the objects associated with it have added to the Main Object iView property. Neither will the iView be Drag&Relate-enabled if, conversely, all the iView-related objects have been imported to the Business Object folder, but have not been added to the Main Object iView property.

The format for entering main objects is: <system_alias>.<object_name> for R/3 and <system_alias>.<InfoObject_name> for BW.

Since strings starting with a numeric value are not supported by the portal Distributed Query Engine (DQE), always precede BW InfoObject names with a ‘T’, as in T0Customer.

The main objects are Business Object Repository (BOR) objects for R/3, and InfoObjects for BW. To obtain a list of the all the required objects to be imported and added to the Main Object property in the portal, you must run the relevant transaction or BW query.

For R/3:

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                            a.      Run transaction se37.

                            b.      Run the function module Wp_All_Objectype_of_Tcode_Get and then execute (F8).

                            c.      Execute (F8) again.

                            d.      Double-clicking the returned table displays a table of main objects of the current transaction, showing the fields, T-code and Object Name.

For BW:

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                            a.      Run transaction se37.

                            b.      Run the function module rs_uni_url_iobj_multi_get_save and then execute (F8).

                            c.      Select I_USER_ROLES and execute again.

                            d.      From the tables returned, double-click E_T_URL_IOBJ_PROP. This returns a list of the main objects of the BW report.

       3.      Once the iView is created, add it to the desired role. For details, see Adding Content Objects to Roles and Worksets.

       4.      Go to the portal Relationship Editor and create relations between the SAP Application objects as desired. You can also correlate between R/3 and BW applications by creating manual relations between their respective objects.

For more information about creating relations, see the Relationship Editor under the portal Unification tab in the Portal Content Catalog.

If there is a necessity for transforming values between R/3 and BW keys, see Editing Queries.

For information about Drag&Relate between R/3 and BW objects, see the section on Correlation between R/3 Object and BW InfoObjects in the BW documentation referred to above in Prerequisites.