SAPBWKEY Maintenance for Static Geo-Characteristics

Purpose

During run time, BI data is combined with a corresponding Shapefile. This enables the BI data to be displayed in geographical form (country, region, and so on) using color shading, bar charts, or pie charts. The SAPBWKEY makes sure that the BI data is assigned to the appropriate Shapefile.

In the standard Shapefiles delivered with the ESRI BI map CD, the SAPBWKEY column is already filled with the two-character SAP country keys (DE, EN, and so on). You can use these Shapefiles without having to maintain the SAPBWKEY beforehand.

Prerequisites

You have marked the geo-relevant characteristic as geo-relevant in the InfoObject maintenance.

Before you are able to follow the example that explains how you maintain the SAPBWKEY for static geo-characteristics, you must ensure that SAP DemoContent is active in your BI system.

You can use ArcView GIS from ESRI to maintain the SAPBWKEY, or you can use other software (MS Excel or FoxPro, for example) that has functions for displaying and editing dBase files.

Process Flow

For static geo-characteristics (such as Country or Region) that represent the geographical drilldown data for a country or a region, you have to maintain the SAPBWKEY for the individual country or region in the attributes table of the Shapefile. The attributes table is a database table stored in dBase format. Once you have maintained the SAPBWKEY, you load the Shapefiles (.shp, .dbf, .shx) into BI. The Shapefiles are stored in the Business Document Service (BDS), a component of the BI server.

The following section uses the example of the 0D_COUNTRY characteristic to describe how you maintain the SAPBWKEY for static geo-characteristics. You use the CNTRY200 Shapefile from the ESRI BI map data CD. The CD contains the borders of all the countries in the world. The maintenance of the SAPBWKEY for static geo-characteristics consists of the following steps.

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1. You create a local copy of the Shapefile from the BI data CD (.shp,.shx,.dbf).

2. You download BI master data into a dBase file.

3. You open the dBase attributes table for the Shapefile (.dbf) in Excel, and maintain the SAPBWKEY column.

4. You load the copied Shapefile into the BI system.

In this example scenario using the 0D_COUNTRY characteristic, the SAPBWKEY column is already maintained in the attributes table and corresponds with the SAP country keys in the master data table. If you maintain a Shapefile where the SAPBWKEY has not been maintained, or where the SAPBWKEY is filled with values that do not correspond to BI master data, you proceed as described in the steps above.

Result

You are now able to use the characteristic as a static geo-characteristic in the Business Explorer. Every user that works with a query containing this static geo-characteristic, is able to attach a map to the query and analyze the data on the map directly.