Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Open Hub Transformation Meets Complex Business Requirements

You can use open hub transformation any time you need to alter extracted data. This method offers a great deal of flexibility and customization because it relies on ABAP code to transform data.


Key Concept

Open hub allows BW to act as a source to distribute data to systems outside of BW. It extracts data from BW’s InfoCubes, DataStore objects (formerly operational data store [ODS] objects), and master data. It then sends that data to external destinations as either a relational database table or a flat file. Transforming data in open hub requires ABAP coding in the form of a custom Business Add-In (BAdI).

The nature of many IT organizations dictates that information needs to flow not only into the BW system, but also out of BW into other systems. For example, your sales team needs BW data to feed a third-party transactional system. This system tracks and maintains shipping orders on a monthly basis. The third-party package has specific data storage requirements. To get the data out of BW into this third-party shipping system, you can use open hub. However, open hub extracts data in its current form. You often need to translate the data to comply with the third-party system’s data requirements, such as a five-digit material number or a leading zero at the beginning of each field. To satisfy these requirements, use custom ABAP code in the open hub transformation Business Add-In (BAdI).

In my example, SAP has a four-character alphanumeric plant field 0PLANT, but the third-party system requires a five-character numeric field for plant. During extraction, you must convert the plant field. Open hub transformation can perform the translation in just three steps: Set up the InfoSpoke, configure open hub transformation, and write custom ABAP code.

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