Easy Editing With File Tool for SAP BW

By Ben Yavuz

In WebFOCUS 7.1.3, Information Builders made extensive changes in the product's SAP BW interfaces. These changes cover both the metadata and the front-end tools.

The changes include making the DMC file tool the default editor for SAP BW synonyms and making the dimension tree view the default view for SAP BW synonyms. In addition, reporting rules for SAP BW are enforced in all tools within Developer Studio, there is a new sorting option (BY... HIERARCHY) available for hierarchies, and new tree control in HTML Layout tool can be used to display hierarchies in a tree structure

In this article we will concentrate on the new file tool and its features. The DMC (Data Management Console) file tool recognizes the BW master data and opens them using the dimension tree view for editing.

The tool can be launched directly from within Developer Studio by double-clicking any SAP BW synonym.

The tool provides three different views using tabs: cube view, synonym text view and access file text view. Unlike the previous file tool, the new one makes sure the integrity of the synonym is protected. This is done by allowing only certain attributes of the synonym to be changed. The attribute values that can be changed vary depending on the field type. The values that can be changed using the file tool are:

	Field name (FIELDNAME)
	Field title (TITLE)
	Usage format (USAGE)
	Description (DESCRIPTION)
	Internal flag
	Caption for the hierarchies
	Field names prefix used in parent/child hierarchy fields

The text views are only for viewing purposes and do not allow editing of the master file/access file texts.

Depending on the field type, it is possible to change fieldnames of more than one field at once.

All variable fields (except formula variables), would have two DEFINE fields to represent the "Caption" and the technical "Name" values. These DEFINE fields are dependent on the original field representing the variable. Changing the field names of the DEFINE fields would break the reference relations. When the variable field name is changed, the change automatically is propagated to the DEFINE fields resulting with new field names for them as well.

In the example shown in Screen 1, the variable "Sales Organization" is represented by the field V_0SALEORG. Note the field names of the DEFINE fields representing the caption and name on Screens 2 and 3.

Changing the field name of the variable field from V_0SALEORG to V_SLS automatically changes the fieldnames of the DEFINE fields for the variable to V_SLS_C and V_SLS_N for the caption and name.

A similar feature exists for fields representing the parent-child hierarchies. If you look at any parent child hierarchy, you would see that 10 fields represent the parent-child hierarchy. You should also notice that all 10 fields would have the same prefix depending on the hierarchy name. The field names of the fields representing a parent-child hierarchy cannot be changed individually. However, by changing the "Field Names prefix" attribute of the hierarchy, field names of all 10 fields would be affected.

One common feature for all fields is that you can click on the ellipsis (…) button next to the "Title" property of the field to launch a new dialog box that allows managing titles in different languages.

Depending on the selected language for the SET paramater LANG, the corresponding title would be used in both the field lists shown in different tools such as report painter and expression builder as well as the titles used in the reports.

Selecting and Deleting Multiple Fields

Deleting multiple fields is very easy with the new tool. First select the fields by holding down either the SHIFT key to select a range or CTRL key to select individual fields and then right-click on one of the selected fields to open the context menu and simply select Delete (Screen 4).

Please note that the tool would not allow deleting the fields representing the variables and fields representing the hierarchies. To delete a hierarchy field, you would have to delete the whole hierarchy by selecting the hierarchy name and then selecting "Delete" from the context menu.

We hope you will like this new tool. I certainly do. In a future WebFOCUS Newsletter article, we will look at the other new features listed at the beginning of this article. Until then, happy editing.