SAP Business Objects Interview Questions and Answers

1. What is SAP Business Objects?

Ans: Business object can be considered as integrated analysis, reporting and query for the purpose of finding a solution to some business professionals that can be helpful for them to retrieve data from the corporate databases in a direct manner from the desktop. This retrieved information can be presented and analyzed within a document that of business objects. Business objects can be helpful as an OLAP tool to high-level management as a significant part of Decision Support Systems.

2.What are the bunch of tools available under the Business Objects 4.0 platform?

Ans: We have the following type of tools under SAP BO BI 4.0:

• Administrator tools
• Business User tools – Business user tools are the ones intended for a business user (Example –HR manager or a financial manager of any organization) which helps them to view and manage business reports to aid them in a decision-making process.
• Data manager tools – They are used to design a semantic layer between the designer tool and its source of data.
• Designer tools – It provides the facility to design a query based on your reporting requirement.

3. Why webi is called as a business user tool as well as a designer tool at the same time?

Ans: The reason behind this is that a business user can log into web intelligence and view reports and if they want to create simple reports on an ad-hoc basis then that is also possible.

Webi is a very simple tool to use. A business user can open a report from the BO repository and can also generate the report by just selecting the universe, run a query on top of it and get their final report as a result.

4.List out the different products related to Business Objects.

Ans: There are various kinds of products related to business objects, and they are

• User module
• Designer
• Supervisor
• Auditor
• Set Analyzer
• Info View
• Business Objects – Software Development – Kit
• Broadcast Agent

5. Define a Chasm Trap.

Ans: Chasm trap is a condition that arises when the values inside the fact table get inflated at the time of measuring the values from two different fact tables by considering the dimensions inside the dimension table.

6.How many Domains are there in Business Objects? What are they?

Ans: There are three Domains in Business Objects and they are:

• Security
• Document
• Universe

7.What are the kinds of modes associated with designer and business objects?

Ans: There are especially two different kinds of modes associated with these platforms, they are

• Enterprise mode
• Workgroup mode

8.What is a secured connection?

Ans: Secured connection is a kind of connection that can be helpful in overcoming the various limitations associated with the former connections. The rights related to this kind of connection can be set over documents as well as objects. Universes can be brought inside the central repository only by making use of the secured connection. The parameters regarding these connection care usually saved inside CMS.

9.How the universes created in IDT are made available in BO?

Ans: Once the universe is created, we publish the universe using a secured connection and then import the universe in BO to make a report on top of it.

10. Explain your idea of a Universe in BO and its relevance with the assignments you have worked upon.

Ans: A universe is a logical layer between the backend and the front end of the reporting. It is a metadata layer that isolates the technical complexities of the source system from the business user/report developer.

In the universe, the required attributes and measures are picked up from the backend and arranged in a way we want to use them further for reporting. In my project, we used to create the IDT universe on top of calculation views developed in HANA. These IDT universes were further utilized to create BO reports.

11. Why webi is called as a business user tool as well as a designer tool at the same time?

Ans: The reason behind this is that a business user can log into web intelligence and view reports and if they want to create simple reports on an ad-hoc basis then that is also possible.

Webi is a very simple tool to use. A business user can open a report from the BO repository and can also generate the report by just selecting the universe, run a query on top of it and get their final report as a result.

12. What is the difference between UDT and IDT?

Ans: The universes which are designed in UDT are UNV universes whereas the universes which are designed in IDT are UNX universes. In UDT we don’t have multi-resource universes enabled whereas in IDT we have this option. IDT is enhanced and more organized as compared to UDT.

13. What are the different versions of Business Objects that you have worked on?

Ans:

• BO XI R1
• BO XI R2
• BO XI R3
• BO XI R3.1
• BO XI R3.2

In year 2011, BO XI 4.0 was introduced and latest version of the tool is SAP BO 4.2.

12. What are the key differences between BOXI R3 and SAP BO 4.x?

Ans: Deski is not available in BO 4.x

IDT is introduced to support multiple data sources

Import Wizard is no longer available in BO 4.x

Bo 4.x is 6 layered architecture as compared to BOXI R3 5 layer architecture.

13. What are the advantages of using Business Objects?

Ans:

Arrays of advantages are there in making use of Business Objects. These are as follows:

1. Graphical Interface
2. Dragging and Dropping
3. Terms those are familiar in business 
4. User friendliness
5. Powerful reports for short span of time
6. Use of documents on basis of an enterprise using Webl

14.  List out the various available data resources.

Ans:

You can access the data from a wide range of sources using Business Objects. These are: 

1. Oracle 
2. MS SQL Server
3.  IBM DB2

15. Explain the role of Slice in Business Objects.

Ans: Slice works with the detail or master reports. Also, it is used for renaming, resetting and deleting the blocks.

16.Name various schemas that are supported by Business Objects designer.

Ans: 

There are 5 different schemas that are supported by Business Objects designer. These are as follows:

1. Star Schema 
2. Multistar Schema
3. Snowflake Schema
4. Data warehouse with aggregates 
5. Normalised production schema

17.What is Designer?

Ans: Designer is a Business Objects IS module used by universe designers to create and maintain universes. Universes are the semantic layer that isolates end users from the technical issues of the database structure. Universe designers can distribute universes to end users by moving them as files through the file system, or by exporting them to the repository.

18.What data sources are available?

Ans: BUSINESS OBJECTS let you access data from a wide range of sources. You can access data from Relational databases (RDBMS), such as ORACLE, Microsoft SQL Server, Informix and IBM DB2. Multidimensional (OLAP) databases, such as Microsoft OLAP Services, Hyperion Essbase, and ORACLE Express.
Virtually any data source using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) procedures.

19.What are new in BO 5.1?

Ans:

• Save business objects documents in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)
• Add hyperlinks to reports such as mail addresses and web site addresses.
• These hyperlinks are maintained when you save the report in HTML or PDF
• Zero Administration - Only the business objects client software installed on the windows pc; all middleware is stored and administered on the web intelligence web server and the server side processing is handled by the web intelligence system

20.How do you publish BO report?

Ans: There are two ways of publishing BO reports on website

• User who has publishing rights for a document can publish that document for other users.
• Documents can be published via a scheduler for Business Object known as BCA or Broadcast Agent.

21. What is User Objects? What are the restrictions?

Ans:User objects are end-user personal objects that are not shared with other end-users. This is because the user objects are stored locally in a specific user object definition file. If an end-user tries to refresh or edit query that contains another user’s user object, the user object is automatically removed from the query and report. A user object is stored inside the Universe folder.

21. Did you do metadata reporting in BO?

Ans: Metadata reporting of BO is possible. BO provides a separate universe which actually contains repository tables, objects etc. Using this Universe one can do metadata reporting in BO.

22. What is Symbolic Objects?

Ans: Objects whose values are text are referred to as Symbolic objects. 

23. What are calculation contexts?

Ans: By default, BUSINESSOBJECTS determines the result of a measure based on the dimension or dimensions in the part of the report in which the measure is inserted. These sets of dimensions are called calculation contexts. Calculation contexts are dynamic in BUSINESSOBJECTS.

24.What is a repository?

Ans: It is a relational data account created on a database like Oracle, MS–Access, Informix, DB2 etc when the BO is installed. It will have all the BO system tables, metadata about designer, Information about universes, the actual universes, user documents and most importantly security information.

25.Can all BusinessObjects users build data providers?

Ans: You can build data providers only if you have purchased the REPORTER module of BUSINESSOBJECTS.

26.What are the user profiles in Supervisor?

Ans:SUPERVISOR offers several standard profiles for the various types of users of Business Objects products.

• General Supervisor
• Supervisor
• Designer
• Supervisor-Designer
• User
• Versatile

27. What is Combined Query?

Ans:Business Objects lets you combine the data returned by up to Eight Queries as one set of results. These combined queries enable you to :

• Obtain a single column name from a multiple objects (Union)
• Obtain data common to two sets of results (Intersect)
• Exclude the results of one query from the results of another (Minus)

28. What is the repository?

Ans:

The repository is the database in which the information about the users and data is present. It is created and maintained by the general supervisor. It is used to share resources of business objects. It comprises of three domains.      

Universe domain – It holds all the exported universes and there may be more than one universe domain in the repository.

Document domain – It holds all exported documents, templates, scripts, and lists of values.

Security domain - secured connections are stored in this.