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By Alok Ranjan: SAP BODS - Beginners Guide
By Alok Ranjan: SAP BODS - Beginners Guide
By Alok Ranjan
AIM:- The purpose of the tutorial is to give a novice a good hands experience on BODS product
to be able to create his/her own local repository , configure job server, start his basic job
development and execute the job to extract data from source systems and load data to target
systems after performing transformations, look-ups and validations.
What is BODS:- It is an ETL tool currently acquired by SAP used for integration with all types of
disparate systems, extracting data from them, transforming them into meaningful information and
loading them into all types of systems.
It is tightly integrated with SAP systems and hence really a good tool to migrate data from legacy
systems to SAP systems with ease and less development efforts with effective debugging and
monitoring capabilities.
How to get started?:After getting BODS installed on the machine, you can see the following on Start>All Programs
There are several components installed as part of SAP BODS 3.2 installation.
In the recent release like SAP BODS4, there has been improvements on the architecture ,
components and the enhancement features in several transforms.
However, the BODS Designer looks pretty same on both 3.2 and 4.0 versions.
The major enhancement is in the Validation Transform in 4.0 which facilitates developers to
switch on and off the validations flags easily for one or several columns.
What to launch next- Normally, the developers would like to start BODS Designer to start
developing jobs straightaway, but it is always good to start creating own local repository first so
that you have full control on your own development environment without any dependency on
others.
In order to create your own local repository, it is important to know the database where you are
allocated space quota to create the same.
It depends on the database vendor like Oracle, SQL Server, Informix, DB2, etc which you have
currently access to.
However, BODS installation comes with default mySQL database, which you should have
installed on your system.
There is need of user/schema and database creation on my SQL which can be easily done by
DBA.
Once user /schema and database name information is assigned to you, you can create the local
repository.
Next Screen shows the BODS Repository Manager which administers you to create local
repository.
As you need to create your own local repository to do your own development activities, you need
to select the Repository type as Local.
Now you need to choose the Database Type/vendor, where you want to create repository on.
Since as mentioned earlier, mySQL database comes shipped with BODS product, it is convenient
to create repository on the same.
Hence, choose MySQL in Database type.
Select the driver MySQL ODBC.( Please note that the version can be different, hence you need
to ask admin team if there is any discrepancy, but all what you want is mySQL driver).
You can see your newly created DSN name in the screen below.
Now, launch again the Repository Manager and check in ODBC drop-down for newly created
DSN name.
If the name is not visible, then you need to go to ODBC again and re-configure.
If it is listed now, you can proceed with the next steps.
You again need to provide all the mySQL login credentials and database name above as you did
earlier for DSN configuration.
Select the flag Show details. It gives you all the information what version it is and all the other
details when you start creating local repository.
Now, hit the Create button.
You need to wait for some time for the repository to be created.
Follow the next screen.
You can check for the version of the repository as well by hitting Get Version.
Now, it is time for the most important work.
You need to launch BODS Designer to start your development activities.
Go to All Programs>SAP Business Objects XI 3.2>sap Business Objects Data Services>Data
Services Designer
Provide all the information you used in creating local repository a while ago.
1) Local Object Library:- It contains all the necessary objects used for the development of jobs.
2) Project Area:- It contains all the jobs which are ready for execution or you are currently working
on.
3) Workspace area: The bigger space, where you actually design your job.
Start development
Right on empty space in local object area/click on Create Project under Getting Started in the
main page.
Right click on the project name and select new Batch Job.
On the right hand side, you can see the list if icons.
You click-once the dataflow and click-once on the workspace area (bigger area)
Name the dataflow as per your wish. It should start with DF_.
In this example, the input file has 3 fields EMP_ID,EMP_NAME and EMP_DEPT.
Click under the field name and add the field names.
Under Data type choose relevant datatype like int for EMP_ID, varchar for EMP_NAME etc.
In the left hand side, click on Root directory folder to browse to the correct path where the input
file is placed .
Click on File name(s) and you should be able to browse to see the input file.
Follow the next subsequent screens.
In this example, the input file is a text file which has 2 records as shown below:-
The text file contains the first row as header defining the field types.
The next 2 rows contain data.
Since, we already defined the flat file format structure with field names, we can ignore the first
row header (shown in the next screen)
When you try to save and close the file format editor, it gives you the above warning.
If you have defined the structure with field names in your file format editor, you should select no,
else it will overwrite with input file provided in the file name.
Here, you select no.
Ignoring the row header
Now, since we have already defined the file format with our field names, we do not require the
row header provided in the input file.
So, ignore the row header. See the next screen.
Now, you need to use this file format as source in your data flow.
Drag and drop the file format in the workspace area and make it as source.
...Previous
Click once on the Query icon on the right hand side and click once on the workspace.
You will get the above screen where you need to provide inputs.
All over again, you need to provide all login credentials and database name as you provided
earlier for creating local repository.
If you are using another database for staging tables, you can use information provided by the
DBA.
You need to define the name of the target table as per your wish.
Click on OK
But, we have not still mapped the fields from source to target.
Click on the name of the query.
You will find that, there are three fields in the source.
You would like to map all the three fields from source to target
Drag and drop each field from left pane to right pane one by one.
Now, try to validate that the design has any errors or warnings
Click on validate current icon
Please remember that you have BODS server components installed on your machine and so you
are responsible to configure Job server as well.
Launch Server manager
...Previous
You can now see the name of the Job server configured.
Click on OK.
In the project area, right click on the job and select Execute.
You will see the Job server name listed that you configured earlier.
Click on OK.
Target now:-
So, we find that data is loaded from flat file to database table.