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The 60 Character Restriction for BW Data Models

Posted by Marc Bernard in SAP Business Warehouse on Aug 7, 2009 5:37:28 AM
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Update:
Good news, with SAP NetWeaver BW 7.4, there is now a standard solution available and the old limitations for key and text length
are not valid anymore. Please see my blog for more details.

Hello Friends,
The topic has been mentioned many times. I'm NOT providing any new solution here. This blog is merely aggregating existing
pieces of information in a single place.

SAP Library
Here are links to the documentation that describe the 60 character limitation for characteristic values.
InfoObject - General
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/b7/f470375fbf307ee10000009b38f8cf/frameset.htm
InfoObject - Master Data/Texts
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/71/f470375fbf307ee10000009b38f8cf/frameset.htm
InfoObject - Compounding
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/ff/f470375fbf307ee10000009b38f8cf/frameset.htm

Blog
Various other blogs have dealt with this topic as well and given some nice solutions.
Long texts in SAP BW: Modeling
Long texts in SAP BW: Modeling
Long texts in SAP BW: Modeling - Follow Up
Long texts in SAP BW: Modeling Follow Up
Long Texts in SAP BW: Displaying in BEx Analyzer. Introduction to Excel Workbooks Formatting. Part I.
Long Texts in SAP BW: Displaying in BEx Analyzer. Introduction to Excel Workbooks Formatting. Part I.
Long Texts in SAP BW: Displaying in BEx Analyzer. Introduction to Excel Workbooks Formatting. Part II.
Long Texts in SAP BW: Displaying in BEx Analyzer. Introduction to Excel Workbooks Formatting. Part II.
Another solution is to embed the comments directly into the analysis item using a web item modification:
BEx Web Interface - Enhancement
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/47/a7f99310971503e10000000a42189c/frameset.htm

Forum
If you want to read up on the discussions, please see the following forum threads.
Is there any way to load more than 60 characters in to one InfoObject
is there any why to load more than 60 characters in to One info object
Field with more than 60 characters
Field with more than 60 characters
Compounding InfoObject need longer than 60 Characters Key
Compounding Infoobject need longer than 60 Characters Key
InfoObject with more than 60 digits
Info Object with more than 60 digits
How-To overcome the 60 Byte restriction for InfoObjects/Reporting?
How-To overcome the 60 Byte restriction for InfoObjects/Reporting ?
Incoming data with more than 60 chars
incoming data with more than 60 chars
Pulling Free text into BW
Pulling Free text into BW
Increasing the length of InfoObject from 60 to 240 characters
Re: Increasing the length of Infoobject from 60 to 240 characters
BI InfoObject length
BI infoobject length
Loading long texts (> 60) into BI 7 with Z-tables?
Loading long texts (> 60) into BI 7 with Z-tables?
Bringing in more than 60 characters into BW
Bringing in more than 60 characters into BW
Long - more than 60-character - texts in BI 7.0
Long - more than 60-character - texts in BI 7.0
Text longer than 60 display in Web (BI 7.0)
Text longer than 60 display in Web (BI 7.0)

Outlook
There is always hope that SAP will overcome this restriction in a future BW release ;-)

We did it! See here.

6974 ViewsTopics: enterprise_data_warehousing/business_warehouse Tags: business_intelligence_(businessobjects), sap_bw,master_data

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5 Comments

Vijay Vijayasankar Aug 7, 2009 8:08 AM

Since it has proven to be a very common use case - would SAP give a "standard" solution to long texts above 60
characters?
I don't think I ever had a BW project where this was not a requirement. However, considering the custom work and long
term maintenance required - I try to talk my users out of it, or give them an option to just jump to R/3 or CRM transaction
to see specific texts. It is a hard argument to win with users though :)
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o
Witalij Rudnicki Aug 7, 2009 11:15 PM (in response to Vijay Vijayasankar)

That's true. On every project users want to see "notes" fields on reports. One of the funny requirements I had
recently is a long description of 255 chars. I had to show that it takes one and a half width of the screen - you
won't be able to see whole field on the screen!!
I hope that SAP will be more creating in resolution of this limitation. It would be cool to have "comment" fields
managed as kind of document links, displaying full note when pointed by mouse pointer.
Regards,
-Vitaliy
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Konstantin Milutin Jun 15, 2010 8:13 PM

Hello.
You've described some work arounds, but what about the reason for this restriction? I can't imagine, that SAP didn't know
about long text necessity, when they created BW model.
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o
Marc Bernard Jun 16, 2010 9:35 AM (in response to Konstantin Milutin)

Hello Konstantin,
keep in mind that we are talking about the technical key of an object. Per definition it needs to be a unique
identifier. A long text (an arbitrary string) certainly does not qualify for this. It is also very inefficient to process
these long texts for example if you wanted to join two tables based on this field.
SAP is working on a solution. Stay tuned.
Regards
Marc
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Alberto Garcia Jan 24, 2014 1:22 PM

Hi Marc! Just came up to your update, really good news. Thank you for informing us, we had just had this issue so... let's
see if we upgrade BW version.