SAP BW BI Content Installation
SAP BW BI Content Installation
What is Business Content?
In the Business Warehouse context, SAP’s Business Content, is an accumulation of pre- defined and configured models for Enterprise reporting. These models are composed of objects like data sources, variables, queries, InfoProviders, InfoSources, transformations, etc.
Business Content gives a good starting point for your data model, this way you don’t have to start from scratch. These flows can always be customised and expanded afterwards.
An example of Business Content is the Inventory Management (SAP HANA-Optimized) flow.
Installation of the Business Content
Before you can use and work with these objects, they will have to be activated in the Data Warehousing Workbench.
Go to transaction code ‘RSA1’, then navigate to the ‘BI Content’ page. Here you have some options to collect and install all the necessary objects. The image shows an example of looking for objects in ‘InfoProviders by InfoAreas’. Then once you have the object you can drag and drop it to the right hand side: ‘Collected Objects’. Here you can adjust some options.
In the ‘Grouping’ option you can select ‘Only Necessary Objects’, this will ensure that the system will collect all dependencies that are needed for this particular data flow.
‘Collection Mode’ should be set on ‘Collect Automatically’.
For the installation and activation, there is the ‘Install’ button, you also have the possibility to simulate the installation. This can be convenient to see if you forgot something when installing an elaborate range of objects in one time.
My advice is to install everything, object by object (with the exception on InfoObjects, they will be collected automatically through dependencies) and layer by layer, so first the staging layer then EDW layer and so on. This way you ensure that you don’t forget anything, and it leaves a smaller margin for error. Before installing always check your list of collected Objects, you can see here what is already installed and what is going to be installed.
After a successful installation it is best practice to test if the data is loaded to the InfoProviders correctly, there will always be some exceptions and errors depending on the data.
As a best practice it is always recommended to copy all the business content objects to your custom created InfoAreas. This ensures that your own active flows will not be overwritten in the future when there was an upgrade and reinstallation of the business content on your system.
Youri Van Heester
SAP Business Intelligence Consultant
