R/3 Reporting through BAPIs

R/3 contains lots of reports. Many of these use data from so-called Information Structures. If you run a report that lists product sales by country by product group, for example, R/3 does not read all sales orders (which could take forever) to provide the data. Instead, aggregated data from an Information Structure is used. SAP ships a few dozen of these, and customers can easily add their own, which will be automatically updated by SAP.

SAP offers two BAPIs, available on the OpenInfoWarehouse object type in the Business Object Repository, to access the Information Structures. This allows you to build your own reporting front-ends (e.g., in a browser) or to extract data for some other purpose.

The first BAPI, OpenInfoWarehouse.GetCatalog, retrieves the metadata for the Information Structures. This includes information about available tables (called Data Sources), columns (called Info Objects), and the relationship between the two. The most important information about the rel...

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ationship is which Info Objects can be used as parameters or selection criteria for which Data Sources.

The second BAPI, OpenInfoWarehouse.GetData, allows you to execute a query for any of the Data Sources, passing whichever parameters and selection criteria you need. The data itself is returned as a block of long strings which you have to interpret yourself.

If you want more details about these BAPIs (and the building of BAPI-enabled components in general), I recommend that you read my article "Why You Need and How You Build BAPI Components" in the March/April 2002 ssue of the SAP Professional Journal (www.sappro.com). If you want to save some time in developing a reporting solution and happen to use Java for your development, you can send me an email and I will send you an evaluation copy of the "ARAsoft OpenInformationWarehouse Component" that encapsulates access to the aforementioned BAPIs.

Thomas G. Schuessler, www.arasoft.de