Data Acquisition with Web Intelligence

Web Intelligence makes it easy for you to access your corporate data by enabling you to work with familiar business terms to retrieve data from a database rather than using technical code required by the data source. One of the possible methods Web Intelligence uses to accomplish this task is to use a universe.

An SAP BusinessObjects universe is the semantic layer that maps everyday business terms to the data stored in the database. Using a universe, you can retrieve data that interests you by dragging and dropping the desired objects.

In your company, universes are created by a universe designer using the information design tool. The designer then makes the universes available to you and other users in your organization so that you can select the appropriate business terms to create queries and retrieve data from the database. Within each universe, these business terms are listed as objects, while similar types of business terms are grouped into classes.

Objects are elements in an SAP BusinessObjects universe that correspond to the data in the database. Ideally, the universe designer names the object with business terms that you use in your daily activities, such as Sales revenue or Customer name. You use these objects to build queries and retrieve the data you want to show in your report.

The components of a universe are as follows:

• Classes and subclasses

  A class is a folder containing objects. A subclass is a sub-folder. Classes organize objects into logical groups.

• Objects

  Objects are elements that map data in a relational database and are named using familiar business terms. For example, named objects in the eFashion universe include Year, Quarter, and Sales revenue.

The types of objects are as follows:

• Dimension

  A dimension object retrieves the data that provides the basis for analysis in a report. Dimension objects typically retrieve character-type data, for example, customer names, store names, or dates.

  A blue flower with four petals represents a Dimension in the Query Panel.

• Attribute (Detail)

  An attribute object provides descriptive data about a Dimension. An Attribute is always attached to the Dimension object for which it provides additional information. For example, the Customer Dimension can have Age and Address detail objects associated with it because those objects provide additional information about a customer.

  A green flower with four petals with a green star represents an Attribute in the Query Panel.

• Measure

  A measure object retrieves numeric data that results from calculations on data in the database. For example, Revenue is the calculation of the number of items sold multiplied by the item price. Measure objects are often located in Measures folders.

  An orange ruler represents a Measure in the Query Panel.

• Predefined query filters

  A predefined query filter restricts the information returned by objects, such as limiting data pertaining to revenue of a specific year. Filters can also prompt the person viewing the report to select a value, such as the Which product? query filter.

  A yellow funnel represents a predefined query filter in the Query Panel.

Below is the list of Web Intelligence data sources (SAP BO BI 4.3 SP2):

You can leverage your SAP BW (incl. BW/4HANA and S/4HANA) environment and query a range of BW InfoProviders or BEx queries via OLAP connections based on the BICS connector.

BW InfoProviders are SAP objects containing physical data that BI applications like Web Intelligence can retrieve for reporting purposes. In SAP BW, you use BEx queries created in SAP BEx Query Designer to run analyses on the different types of InfoProviders, such as Data Store Objects, cubes, InfoObjects, InfoSets, and others. You decide whether you want to reuse existing BEx queries, or query InfoProviders directly.

No universe is needed when you query BW InfoProviders and BEx queries, as the application uses direct access to the BW data source to retrieve metadata. When accessing BW InfoProviders and BEx queries, Web Intelligence automatically maps the BW metadata to hierarchies, attributes, measures, and dimensions, like BW OLAP universes queries, so you can reuse them in your report.

With Direct Access, create queries on SAP HANA views directly and bypass universes.

Direct Access provides direct access to SAP HANA information models, also called HANA views, allowing the application to connect directly to the cube representing the information model. Direct Access generates a transient universe on the fly so that you don't have to go through the universe authoring process. It saves you time, as you can get straight to the query specification in the query panel.

Web Intelligence supports native HANA views modeled in SAP HANA Studio, and HANA HDI calculation views modeled in SAP Web IDE for HANA with XS Advanced.

In Web Intelligence, you can use a Free-hand SQL (FHSQL) statement to query a relational database.

FHSQL data providers are useful when you have complex SQL statements that use advanced database functions not supported by the standard semantic layer.

See the following video to learn more about the web intelligence document component and query panel.

You run queries that were built in the Query Panel to return data to the document for presentation and further analysis. When using the web client, these queries are sent to a processing server (part of the BI Platform) and then forwarded to the data source.

The processing server takes the data returned from the data source and places the results in a data provider. You can then interact with this data in the Web Intelligence client.

This process repeats each time you refresh the query.

You can save the current document to a Personal folder or a Public folder (if you have the appropriate rights).

The Save As functionality only saves the document in Web Intelligence document format (*.WID).

If you want to save a document in another format, use Export to convert the document to PDF, CSV, XLS, TXT or HTML format.