Mahmoud Creating Universes with SAP BusinessObjects

Create and maintain powerful SAP BusinessObjects Universes with the SAP Information Design Tool
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78217-091-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 310 Seiten

This book is aimed at both new developers as well as experienced developers. If you are a new SAP BusinessObjects Universe developer who is looking for a step-by-step guide supported with real-life examples and illustrated diagrams, then this book is for you. If you are a seasoned BusinessObjects Universe developer who is looking for a fast way to map your old experience in Universe designer to the newer Information Design Tool, then this book is for you as well.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mahmoud, Taha

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik EDV & Informatik Allgemein

Leseproben

Creating your first Universe step by step

After we've opened the IDT, we want to start creating our Universe. We need to create the following three main resources to build a Universe:

• Data connection: This resource is used to establish a connection with the data source. There are two main types of connections that we can create: relational connection and OLAP connection.
• Data Foundation: This resource will store the metadata, such as tables, joins, and cardinalities, for the physical layer.
• The Business layer: This resource will store the metadata for the business model. Here, we will create our business objects such as dimensions, measures, attributes, and filters. This layer is our Universe's interface and end users should be able to access it to build their own reports and analytics by dragging-and-dropping the required objects.

We need to create a local project to hold all the preceding Universe resources. The local project is just a container that will store the Universe's contents locally on your machine. Finally, we need to publish our Universe to make it ready to be used.

Creating a new project

You can think about a project such as a folder that will contain all the resources required by your Universe. Normally, we will start any Universe by creating a local project. Then, later on, we might need to share the entire project and make it available for the other Universe designers and developers as well.

This is a folder that will be stored locally on your machine, and you can access it any time from the IDT Local Projects window or using the Open option from the File menu. The resources inside this project will be available only for the local machine users. Let's try to create our first local project using the following steps:

1. Go to the File menu and select New Project, or click on the New icon on the toolbar.
2. Select Project, as shown in the following screenshot:
3. The New Project creation wizard will open.
4. Enter in the Project Name field, and leave the Project Location field as default. Note that your project will be stored locally in this folder.
5. Click on Finish, as shown in the following screenshot:

Now, you can see the empty project in the Local Projects window.

Note

You can add resources to your local project by performing the following actions:

• Creating new resources
• Converting a Universe
• Importing a published Universe

Creating a new data connection

Data connection will store all the required information such as IP address, username, and password to access a specific data source. A data connection will connect to a specific type of data source, and you can use the same data connection to create multiple Data Foundation layers. There are two types of data connection: relational data connection, which is used to connect to the relational database such as Teradata and Oracle, and OLAP connection, which is used to connect to an OLAP cube.

To create a data connection, we need to do the following:

1. Right-click on the Universe.
2. Select a new Relational Data Connection.
3. Enter as the connection name, and write a brief description about this connection.

   Tip

   
   

   The best practice is to always add a description for each created object. For example, code comments will help others understand why this object has been created, how to use it, and for which purpose they should use it.

   We can see the first page of the New Relational Connection wizard in the following screenshot:

4. On the second page, expand the MS Access 2007 driver and select ODBC Drivers.
5. Use the ODBC connection that we already created in the previous chapter.
6. Click on Test Connection to make sure that the connection to the data source is successfully established.
7. Click on Next to edit the connection's advanced options or click on Finish to use the default settings, as shown in the following screenshot:

   We can see the first parameters page of the MS Access 2007 connection in the following screenshot:

You can now see the connection under the project in the Local Projects window.

Note

The local relational connection is stored as the file, while the shared secured connection is stored as a shortcut with the extension. The local connection can be used in your local projects only, and you need to publish it to the BO repository to share it with other Universe designers.

Creating a new Data Foundation

After we successfully create a relation connection to the Northwind Microsoft Access database, we can now start creating our foundation.

Data Foundation is a physical model that will store tables as well as the relations between them (joins).

Note

Data Foundation in the IDT is equivalent to the physical data layer in the UDT.

To create a new Data Foundation, right-click on the project in the Local Projects window, and then select New Data Foundation and perform the following steps:

1. Enter as a resource name, and enter a brief description on the Data Foundation.
2. Select the Single Source Data Foundation.
3. Select the NorthWind.cnx connection.

After that, expand the connection, navigate to , and perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to the table and then drag it to an empty area in the Master view window on the right-hand side.
2. Save your Data Foundation.

Tip

An asterisk (*) will be displayed beside the resource name to indicate that it was modified but not saved.

We can see the Connection panel in the Universe resource in the following screenshot:

Creating a new Business layer

Now, we will create a simple Business layer based on the table that we already added to the Data Foundation. Each Business layer should map to one Data Foundation at the end.

Note

The Business layer in the IDT is equivalent to the business model in the UDT.

To create a new Business layer, right-click on the project and then select New Business Layer from the menu. Then, we need to perform the following steps:

1. The first step to create a Business layer is to select the type of the data source that we will use. In our case, select Relational Data Foundation as shown in the following screenshot:
2. Enter as the resource name and a brief description for our Business layer.
3. In the next Select Data Foundation window, select the Data Foundation from the list.
4. Make sure that the Automatically create folders and objects option is selected, as shown in the following screenshot:

Now, you should be able to see the folder under the Business layer. If not, just drag it from the Data Foundation and drop it under the Business layer. Then, save the Business Layer, as shown in the following screenshot:

A new folder will be created automatically for the table. This folder is also populated with the corresponding dimensions. The Business layer now needs to be published to the BO server, and then, the end users will be able to access it and build their own reports on top of our Universe.

If you successfully completed all the steps from the previous sections, the project folder should contain the relational data connection (), the Data Foundation layer (), and the Business layer...

Über Autor(innen)

Mahmoud Taha :

Taha M. Mahmoud (PMP, TOGAF, ITIL, and CSM) is a senior BI consultant, BI project manager, and solution architect. He has a BS degree in computer science and automatic control from Alexandria University, Egypt. He has a great passion for new technologies, especially those related to business intelligence. Taha has more than 9 years of experience in working on, consulting for, and deploying successful BusinessObjects projects in the banking and telecom industries. He is the author of Creating Universes with SAP BusinessObjects. You can contact him on Twitter at @tahama_2000 or visit his blog (http://business-objects-xi.blogspot.com/).