After several month of evaluating the new SAP Netweaver BW Connector in Xcelsius and reading lot's of whitepapers and how-to guides i would like to share some key points on the new connectivity and the marriage of technology.

What's new about it:

The new connection type for BW data offers a tighter integration of BW data into Xcelsius dashboards. The Xcelsius dashboard can be stored on the BW server and is integrated into the BW infrastructure, providing features such as transport, translation support (does anybody really care about the translation features?!), where-used lists, and collection of dependent objects.

Which query features are supported:

BEx queries are used directly, as the communication between Xcelsius and the back end system is done via the same interface that is used for BEx Web layouts.

The following features are supported:

• (sub) totals defined in the query
• Calculated key figures
• Restricted key figures
• Exception aggregations
• Conditions
• Filters
• Variables
• Default values

But: Every cloud has a silver lining. The following features are not supported so far:

• hierarchies
• exceptions
• input enabled queries
• Planning features
• interactive features know from the BEx frontends such as drill
  down, swap axes etc.

Limitations on systems and queries:
One dashboard can only be connected to one SAP NetWeaver BW system at a time. However, one
dashboard may have several connections to the same BW system, and combine data from different queries.

Performance considerations and hints:
A key feature of that connection type is that it allows you to retrieve both the query result and the list of values in a single execution. This greatly reduces the number of connections in your Xcelsius dashboard (e.g. providing master data for selector components).

The system will read query information on each connection defined at the initial load, whether the connection is to be refreshed or not. This has an impact on performance and it is recommended to have as few connections as
possible defined in the dashboard.

Some remarks on dashboard development and life cycle management:
If you replace the query in the connection by another query then all connections to Excel
ranges where data is inserted or read from (see below) are cleared. (Make sure you have noted down which data is written into which Excel range!!!)

When building up a dashboard, Xcelsius will read the necessary query information once the data connection is defined. If the query is changed from BEx Query Designer after that, Xcelsius Designer will not notice these changes. However, the BW web runtime will use the latest active version of the query when executing the dashboard. Thus the definitions in the dashboard might not match the query definition or structure anymore and problems may occur. It is highly recommended to check the dashboard anytime the query structure is changed and, if necessary, re-import the query information into the dashboard.