White eggs and colorful balls

With Hana technology, SAP's data storage base is even more powerful than ever before. But even with high-performance systems like S/4 Hana, which offer their own reporting capabilities, SAP BW remains the platform for bringing together data from different systems across the company and supporting analysis processes.

As the volume of data in companies continues to grow and the need for structuring and effective analysis increases, a consolidated data warehouse becomes even more important than before - this is the general consensus.

What way out does SAP Web Services offer?

With SAP Web Services you can use an interface between web pages and BW. In the frontend there is an HTML page where you can integrate common JavaScript libraries like jQuery.

There you implement an Ajax framework for processing the web services. For this purpose, one must enter the parameters in the form of an HTTL. The BW represents the web server as a backend.

Each web service starts a function module that can use freely configurable input and output parameters - including tabular ones. This makes the full range of BW data processing available in the back end.

The output parameters of the function modules are converted by the SAP framework into an XML structure, which can be processed further with JavaScript. In this way, a wide range of freely available libraries is also available here to display the data.

Custom Software

So you can easily find usable JavaScript libraries for displaying pivot tables, editor elements for text formatting or support for exporting to Excel.

Although their scope often does not meet the comprehensive feature list of comparable standard objects in SAP frontend tools, they can be adapted to special requirements much more easily because the source code is open.

This means that the requirements must be recorded more precisely, because many "standard features" of the SAP product range that seem self-evident are not available here.

The general advantages and disadvantages of individual software compared to standard software apply: Many individual functionalities have to be implemented, for example the support of characteristic hierarchies.

This means that the more complex the required functionalities are, the more time-consuming it is to implement them yourself using BW Web services. On the other hand, it is easier to integrate video players, for example, or to aggregate comments that can be recorded at any level using self-service.

Self-service analysis with commenting

A self-service analysis application allows users to explore data on their own based on free selection and constraints of manifold characteristics (data fields), comparable to the pivot functionality in Microsoft Excel.

The difference to the simpler dashboard is the display as well as the larger amount of modifiable parameters. It is therefore not possible to meaningfully link a collection of meta information, such as comments, to the navigation states. This is because, in contrast to the dashboard application, it cannot be assumed that this will be found again by the recipient of the information.

If the user enters comments after selecting the data (drill-down), these should also be able to be propagated to higher-level navigation states (bottom-up). In the other use case, comments on aggregated data should still be visible in more specific selections (top-down).

Further application scenarios

The web services allow the creation of attractive and highly interactive, but functionally simple applications based on the consolidated data in the SAP BW Data Warehouse.

The main advantage is that the processing logic does not have to fit into the rigid garb of the usual BW data structures and reporting or planning techniques.

On both the frontend and backend sides, all the JavaScript or Abap programming registers can be pulled out. In addition to an attractive visual presentation, this also enables the unconventional capture, storage and processing of data, such as input masks with integrated workflows. These are comparable to Floorplan Manager solutions, but with more modern and flexible presentation.

From colorful balls

In fact, for many users, the visual appearance is often the main reason for looking for alternative solutions away from SAP standard tools. The example presented here shows that SAP BW Webservices can also be used to map functionally useful use cases beyond the standard options.

So if you'd rather have colorful balls instead of white eggs, you don't have to do without data storage in BW on Hana.