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Categories
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Reporting
Reporting
- 18 Techniques for Locating the Underlying Data of a Screen Field
by Dennis Barrett
SAP's three-tiered architecture is the backbone of an R/3 infrastructure. It's what makes an R/3 system flexible, reliable, and open, all at the same time. It's also what makes locating underlying data, at times, so inherently difficult. For example, when you need several fields from a transaction for a report or an enhancement, you will probably need to find many of the transaction's tables and establish the links among them. Those links are often not obvious. This article shares 18 techniques the author has gathered and developed over time to locate such data, along with advice on which techniques to try first, and which to use only as a last resort.
- A Developer's Guide to the New ALV Grid Control
by Jens Stumpe, Information Developer, SAP AG
Within an SAP system there is a lot of data that needs to be reviewed, maintained, and interpreted. Granted, the effort to create a classical list for just simple output of data is minimal, but amass a few lists across a few applications, each created by a different developer, and users may find they have to contend with different methods for performing common list-handling functions such as sorting or filtering. The ALV Grid Control makes things simple, with a standard set of common functions that ensure a consistent user experience across all applications.
This article shows you how to integrate and configure the ALV Grid Control within an application, modify the ALV Grid Control's standard functions, integrate application-specific pushbuttons and context menus within this control, and support interactive reporting with this tool.
- Create Powerful Reports Quickly and Easily: A 'Train-the-Trainer' Approach to
Learning and Teaching the ABAP Query Reporting Tool
by Danielle Larocca Signorile, Independent SAP Executive Consultant
The ABAP Query is a powerful report-writing tool that your business end users can use to create customized reports from any data that is viewable on an SAP screen, or that can be calculated from the viewable data, with no programming skills required. That means less work for IT professionals like yourself, since you no longer need to create custom reports for them. Walking you through the steps of creating an actual report, this article goes beyond the documentation to teach you how to create meaningful reports with the ABAP Query so that you, in turn, can train your users to do the same.
- Dynamic Documents: Completing the New Face of Reporting
by Jonathan Maidstone, Technical Author, SAP AG
Screen programming and list programming used to occupy two different worlds. Controls programming changed that. The ALV Grid Control allows you to replace tabular lists with control-based tables on screens, and the SAP Tree Control provides a new way of displaying hierarchical lists. But how can you display unstructured output in a control-based environment? Starting with Release 4.6C, you display it with dynamic documents. A dynamic document is an HTML document you can construct in a program via ABAP methods, which allow you to add elements and content to the document on the fly while ensuring it has the right styles and colors to fit in with the rest of the system.
This article provides an introduction to dynamic documents: how they fit into screens in the SAP system, and how you can use them for both simple output of text, pictures, or links, and for more complicated documents involving tables and forms for user interaction — in short, a brief overview of how you can move away from traditional list-bound output to create more compact and attractive user interfaces.
- Empower your end users to create informative reports in real time with no
technical training — an administrator’s guide to configuring and using the SAP
R/3 query reporting tools
by Danielle Larocca Signorile
From a simple lookup to answer a quick question about employee benefit elections, to a detailed financial outlook to project earnings for the fiscal year, reporting plays a key role in your business. And like any area in your organization, more efficient reporting means better business. The query reporting tools, delivered with SAP R/3 4.6C, enable end users to create real-time reports quickly and easily, on their own, with no special technical training. Using easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, this article shows you how to configure these tools for end users, and how to use the tools to create custom reports, so that you can train and support end users. It also points out differences between the tools, and when it makes sense to use each.
- How to prepare for an SAP audit: What you need to do to ensure a successful result
by Steve Biskie, Founder, SAP Audit Solutions
It’s audit time! Do your employees know what to do? You’re not alone if they don’t. There are books and newsletters and Web sites to tell your auditor what to do, but until now, nothing for the poor “auditee.” That’s about to change. This article, the first in a series, is designed to help SAP project managers, administrators, and users to understand the typical SAP-related audit requirements and to ready these individuals for their next SAP-related audit. You will find information about the primary categories of an SAP audit, as well as specific tips on the General Computer Controls (GCC) audit. No one likes an audit, but it’s a lot easier if you know what to expect.
- Need a Quick Look at Your SAP R/3 Data? Create Simple Reports Fast with
QuickViewer
by Danielle Larocca Signorile, Independent SAP Executive Consultant
Imagine your boss shows up at your desk 10 minutes before the big meeting looking for the number of active employees in the New York office or the number of currently open invoices. “No problem,” you’d probably say, while cringing at the thought of putting aside your urgent tasks to spend time looking up the data.
- Real-Time Business Process Analytics with SAP NetWeaver BPM and SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer
by Volker Stiehl, Chief Solution Expert, SAP AG (May 2010)
With the latest version of SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (7.2), you can write back any business-related data that you find useful for analysis. You can create charts to visualize the aggregated data using SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer. A new reporting activity in your process model allows you to obtain detailed insight into processes by means of performance indicators. Here are the necessary steps to implement analysis on process data.
- Reconsidering the ABAP Query for Your Reporting Needs - Proper Configuration Is
the Key to Success
by Danielle Larocca Signorile, Independent SAP Executive Consultant
The ABAP Query is the only report-writing tool delivered with your R/3 system that is available across all modules. It is also the easiest SAP reporting tool to use, and in many respects still the most popular. As an IT professional, you can use the ABAP Query to write a report containing any information in your SAP database, and even better, you can easily teach business users to do the same thing on their own, empowering them with access to their data without a reliance on the IT staff. This article explains why the ABAP Query may deserve a place in your organization's SAP reporting arsenal, details how to establish an optimal operating environment to avoid unnecessary system drain, and covers some techniques for enhancing the design of ABAP Query reports.
- Simplifying Ad Hoc Queries and Web Reporting with SAP's New InfoSet Query
by Tobias Hagen and Kai Willenborg, SAP Business Intelligence & Workplace, SAP AG
R/3 Release 4.6C introduces InfoSet Query, a new tool based on SAP Query technology that enables end users to quickly and easily generate or modify ad hoc reports on their own. Via this new tool, which uses the SAP role concept, users can create and publish Web reports that can be accessed via a browser, and export reports to Microsoft Word and Excel, all without so much as a single line of code. That's good news for end users, and even better news for IT departments, which are often overrun with end user requests for these types of requirements.
This article shows you what the InfoSet Query technology looks like from the end user's perspective, and then goes behind the scenes to show you how to build the InfoSets themselves, which are the basis for the queries, and how to integrate InfoSets with assigned roles and then distribute them.
- Take a fresh look at the redesigned SAP List Viewer in SAP NetWeaver ’04: Write
programs to present tabular data in less time and with fewer lines of code
by Falko Schneider, SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence, SAP AG
As an application developer, you are all too aware of the effort involved in coding generic reporting and interaction capabilities, such as sorting and totaling, into your applications from scratch. The good news is that SAP NetWeaver ’04 provides a completely redesigned, fully integrated SAP List Viewer (ALV) that enables you to embed reporting and interaction capabilities directly into your applications, no code required, with a common look and feel for all reports. This article describes the available data display options, introduces the new object-oriented programming model, and shows you how easy the redesigned API is to use by walking through some simple examples to get you started.
- The SAP Query Reporting Tool: A Faster and Easier Way to Enrich Your SAP
Reports with Calculated and Dynamic Data
by Danielle Larocca Signorile, Independent SAP Executive Consultant
It’s no secret that SAP Query is a powerful reporting tool in your SAP arsenal. With SAP Query, you can create robust reports using SAP data from any application module in your R/3 environment. But what if you want to perform calculations on your data and display those results in a report, instead of just presenting the data as is? One popular method is to perform the calculations in Microsoft Excel. Another is to create a custom ABAP report. But did you know that you can easily accomplish the same thing right in SAP Query? This article shows you how to create calculated fields in SAP Query and then use those fields to perform specific calculations or output particular values based on specified conditions, and output static or dynamic text, icons, and symbols in your reports.
- Use SAP Solution Manager’s extensive reporting capabilities to ensure consistent performance
across your system
landscape through proactive monitoring
by Henrik Zimmermann, Senior Product Manager, SAP AG
Veit Eska, Senior Developer, SAP AG
Michael Mayer, Senior Support Consultant, SAP AG
The growth of SAP Solution Manager as a tool to
maintain, support, configure, and upgrade SAP landscapes
brings with it the need for increased reporting capabilities,
so you can be proactive in addressing issues before
they become critical. SAP Solution Manager 4.0 includes
a wide range of reporting options for generating
technical and administrative information about your
system landscape, including SAP EarlyWatch Alert
Reporting, Service Reporting, EarlyWatch Alert Reporting
in SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence, Service Level
Reporting, and System Availability Reporting. This
article provides an overview of these new options
and explains how you can use them to ensure consistent
performance across your system landscape.
- Write Costing-Based CO-PA Reports Your Readers Will Trust — Five Secret Tricks to Building
General Ledger Reconciliation
into Your 'Profitability Analysis' Data
by Kurt Goldsmith, Senior Consultant, ICM America LLC
Trying to develop or use SAP's Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs) without a solid understanding of what they are, how they are defined in the Business Object Repository (BOR), and what the difference between a BAPI and the ABAP Function Module underneath is, leads to errors and frustration. Beginners are often confounded as to how to approach the BAPIs. Even experienced developers do not always appreciate all relevant details of the BOR metadata. This article provides a solid foundation for any BAPI-related activity and is required reading for developers who use or create BAPIs, as well as their managers.
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