How to use Analysis Process Designer as an alternative for Open Hub.
How to use Analysis Process Designer as an alternative for Open Hub.
Last year, our colleague Nico wrote a blog post on how to use the Open Hub technology in SAP BW to export BEx Query results. This was a handy solution as there was no need to store any additional data in the system and the Open Hub system is easy to deploy and use.
The blog ended with a list of limitations that would prevent you to use certain queries as an Info Provider and thus are unable to be used as a source for data transfer via Open Hub.
At one of my previous projects we ran into one of these limitations: they wanted to export the data from a set of queries that contained two structures. Alas, we could not enable these BEx Queries as Info Providers and had to scratch Open Hub from our design card. Due to this set back, we went back to a much older SAP BW component: the APD or Analysis Process & Designer. This a workbench that can be used to analyse, create and execute analysis processes.
However old this technology might be, you are able to use almost all (older) BW components as data source: Characteristic attributes, DSO’s, tables, flat files…
Once loaded, you have access to a whole arsenal of tools to manipulate your data: filters, transpose, union, ABC-analysis… as well as your own written ABAP code. As you can already see: the sky is the limit as to what you can do with your data before transferring it. As to your targets, you are limited to the ‘older’ BI components: characteristic and CRM attributes, DSO, flat files and some analytical containers.
- To create your new ADP process, you can use the T-code: RSANWB.
- In the folder structure, right-click on the ‘General’ folder and choose ‘Create’
- Give your APD a meaningful technical description for re-usability later on.
- The next step is to add the queries and data manipulations you need in order to get the desired output format.
In this example, we took three different queries as our data source. Afterwards, we removed unwanted columns and applied filtering to get the desired subset of data. Then we used an ABAP routine to apply some specific customer logic for further aggregation and enrichment of the data before merging these results into a single flat file that would be saved on the BW server.
5. In order to easily save the file, we used the “FILE” t-code to create a logical path and file name. The usage of this t-code is also explained in Nico’s blog.
Another handy thing is that any APD block can be easily added in a process chain to be run on a regular basis. As extra, we had written a small ABAP-program that would rename the generated file and add the desired year-month value as suffix, in order to have some versioning when the files would be exported.
The file would then be moved to specific folder on the BW server, which was being monitored by an external application that would pick it up and move to its desired location on a remote server, where it could be used by the business.
This case is a prime example that all roads (eventually) lead to Rome! As we were restricted by SAP in the use of the Open Hub, we had to go and look around for alternative solutions and found what we needed in a quite old workbench, which still proves to be very flexible and capable to this day.
Blog By Pieter Lingier
