Bex reports - change sort criteria

[Former Member]

Hello, experts. I need to modify 3.5 BEX reports to sort products by Core Brands and then all other brands. I have a list of products which are considered to be Core Brands. Product Master data does not have any Core brands indicators. How do I go about identifying core brand products in the cube and then sort in the reports by Core products first.

I'm new to BEX reporting so Any input is appreciated.

Thank you. Alina.

[Former Member]

Hi,

I can think of a few ways to do this depending on how complicated you want to make things.

Probably the easiest way is to add an indicator for Core Brand .... and 'X' in the field means it's a core brand and you can either display only core brands or sort this field descending.

Getting a bit deeper, you can create an attribute to your "Brand" characteristic and either assign the 'X' or give it a number -- 1 being your biggest brand and 10 your least biggest. Make the attribute navigational in your characteristic and data target and you can immediately start restricting/using it -- as in, without a reload.

There are various ways to identify these values, probably the best is if the field is already populated in R/3. The next best would be to use a lookup table or info object .... that would contain the mappings between brands and indicator value (X or 1 or 2 ....). You would need to look up the values during your load time.

Brian

[Former Member]

Thanks, Brian. It's very helpful. I like the least complicated solution. Of course I have follow up questions. When you say add Core Brand indicator - how do I go about doing that. And also, when I have this indiocator ready, how do I sort my data by Core brands first and then by other products in the report. Thanks again. Alina.

[Former Member]

Hi Alina,

I am am going to make a few assumptions, please modify what you are actually doing to this.

I am going say you are working with 0BRAND (because I am not sure which characteristic you are working with ... please post if you have follow on questions).

Create a new characteristic called ZCR_BRND -- Core Brand and make it a data type NUMC with length 2 (you can have up to 100 core brands). No master data, you can have texts if you like, but you will probably have to fill them in Manually because this data probably doesn't reside in R/3.

After ZCR_BRND is activated, go to 0BRAND and change it. Make sure "With master data" is checked under the Master data/texts tab. Then go to the Attributes tab. Add ZCR_BRND as an attribute and make it a navigational attribute. You can make this a time dependent attribute if you want to track core products by time ... e.g. last year's core products may be different than this year's...... Activate 0BRAND.

Now maintain your master data using your preferred method .... manually if you only have a few, text file if you have a lot, or R/3 datasource if the data is maintained there. For the text file aend R/3 datasource, you need to create the datasources and infosources to load. So, for now, if you are unsure about doing that and just want to test this method out, manually type in a few values in master data maintenance, save the updates, then make sure the data is activated (right-click on the characteristic and choose activate master data).

Go to your dataprovider and add ZCR_BRND in as a navigational attribute and reactivate the data provider.

Go to your query, you can now use the Core Brand indicator on your query. If you make it the first column, those products will show up sorted by your indicator.

Brian

[Former Member]

Thank you, Brian. As you can tell I'm new to SAP BW world -very much appreciate detailed instructions. I'll go ahead and add this new characteristics. Another question - in BEX report once I have this nav.attribute ready, how do I sort products within Core Brands first and then products outside of Core Brands. It's like 2 levels of sort - first Core/other and then products within Core/other. Thanks again. Alina.

[Former Member]

Hi Alina,

You can make two queries or add a variable on ZCR_BRAND. If you make two queries, you can filter out values with a value (or restrict out values <> #) to get core brands and include values = # for a non-core brand query.

If you add a variable, then at run time you can choose the core brand ranking or all core brands <> #. I would choose this method since it is only 1 query to maintain. ... to create a variable, in your query on the left hand side of the screen, right click on ZCR_BRAND and choose create new variable. Make a characteristic value variable and make it optional, ready for input, and type selection option.

Also, in the rows section of the query, you can place ZCR_BRAND as the first characteristic and it will sort automatically. If you don't want to see it, you can go into the characteristic's properties and choose "No Display" for the Display As property.

Brian