Over the last few weeks I’ve been working full steam on a project to lay Xcelsius on top of BW (Accelerated no less). One of the cool capabilities of BW to significantly improve performance over standard parameters is to use variables. Variables pass straight through from the BW query and look like a prompt in Webi. The variable is a parameter that gets passed to the BW query before it actually runs vs. being applied to the result set. This can net a significant performance gain.
Stepping back a few weeks, I started the project planning to use the BI Web Services capability included in the Webi Rich Client. This is an awesome approach if you haven’t caught on. You can either work on demand with data, or read the latest instance of a Webi report like a WSDL. Things were running smoothly until I noticed something quite peculiar. When importing the newly created BI Web Services into my dashboard (this is on Xcelsius 2008 SP3.2), I noticed that none of my variables got generated as input parms in the Xcelsius connection.
I tried to iterate through this a couple of ways before eventually submitting a case and verifying the behavior with the support engineer. I did note that the behavior does not occur when using QaaWS, so that was the final connection choice. However, the rub there is sorting doesn’t work on a QaaWS service on BW.
At least it works.