To replace the previous Document as a Web Service and Query as a Web Service, Web Intelligence exposes an OData Web Service.
With OData Web Services, you retrieve data from existing visualization that you can reuse in other documents. To benefit from OData Web Services, you first need to create OData data providers from existing visualizations and generate a unique URL. That URL allows the application to retrieve data from a given visualization and reuse it.
To do so:
- In Design mode, right-click a report element and select Copy Link For → OData Web Services in its context menu. The selected report element cannot be contained in a section.
- In Data mode, right-click a cube and select Copy OData Web Services Link.
This generates an OData URL that is copied in the clipboard of the operating system. This URL can be used as a data source for anotherWeb Intelligence document, in other tools that can read OData or in a program based on REST Web Services.
When creating a document or adding a new query, in the Select a Data Source dialog box, select the Web Services section and then Web Intelligence OData Web Services.
In the Enter an OData URL dialog box, enter the URL of the OData service and click OK.
The same common Query Panel opens with the objects exposed by the OData service in the left panel. As for all data sources, you may select the objects to add in the query or to use in a filter.
When your query is complete, click Run.
Once the query has been run, you can work with the dataset retrieved from the data source on the OData service and format your document.
Object properties are no longer set in the Query Panel, but in a new Object Properties tab once you have run the query.
Note
For more information, please refer to Unit: Working with Formulas and Variables - Lesson: Editing Objects Properties.
Watch this video to learn how to build queries on OData Web Services:
Restrictions
In the SAP BI 4.3, only OData Web Services exposed by Web Intelligence are supported.
The following capabilities are not yet supported for the OData data sources:
- Combined queries.
- Sub-queries and list of values of objects when defining a filter. Only constants and prompts are supported.
- Query stripping.