What is the future support roadmap for EVDRE in BPC products?

[houtbyr]

There are several sources that suggest that *existing* EVDRE functionality is fully supported and there's no plans to deprecate them (e.g. 2648783)... yet the functions exist under an Excel function category labeled "EVFunctions (Deprecated)" (e.g. 1888246).

Some of our reports designed with EVDRE in an old version of BPC 7.0/7.5 MS are able to be loaded in BPC 10.0/10.1 NW (they may or may not have been sent through an EVDRE migration by the consultants). While they load, some EPM functions (e.g. Edit Report) are disabled for sheets with EVDRE. It's also now not possible to create new reports with EVDRE (I'm not sure why you'd want to try anyway if you're in BPC 10.0+).

We initially tried to switch from EPM to AO for the client interface, but the EVDRE reports would not load correctly in AO. By default, AO does not enable EVDRE support (2367364) but it seems that it's possible to override this and get it to work... for now.

With all of these things considered, it seems obvious that EVDRE support in current/future products is fading fast. With future potential upgrades to BPC Optimized or BPC 11.0 for BW/4HANA, the chances of supporting these EVDRE reports seem unlikely. Native EPM reports may not work in future releases for all we know.

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Is there clear direction documented of the future support of these EVDRE reports?

The same question can be asked of reports that are using EPM functions instead of native EPM report design. We had a lot of reports in 7.5 that used EV functions to manually build reports that were converted to EPM functions by project consultants during our migration (instead of using native EPM design). Is there a planned point where we will be forced to re-engineer/redesign these reports as well?

Rich

[former_member186338]

My recommendation: use standard EPM reports - better performance!

Performance of EVDRE and EPMSaveData etc... is not perfect and will not be improved!

[houtbyr]

I agree that by using EPMRetrieveData functions (and the like) we have ended up with several performance and inconsistent data issues with reporting (through unreported errors stopping processing). I also understand that the best practice for building new reports in version 10.x is using the "EPM Addin" or "native EPM reports" using the "New Report" dialog. (I've read several forum posts where Vadim and others have suggested these things)

My questions is not around building new reports or current design best practice... instead around how to handle old reports that have been migrated to newer versions and how long that will be supported.

We have been using BPC since MS version 5-something and have upgraded through to version 7.0 MS, 7.5 MS, then a large project to re-implement to 10.0 NW. Since that major change, we've also upgraded to 10.1 NW. A lot of our reports (if not most) were designed early on in old versions with old technology.
Consultants were tasked with producing similar reports in 10.0 NW to what we already had developed in 7.0 so in many cases, EV functions were replaced with EPM functions and the reports with EVDRE were somehow migrated.

So, we have:

• new reports using EPM "New Report",
• manually returning data to individual cells using EPMRetrieveData functions, and
• migrated EVDRE reports.

It's best to rebuild our reports to use native EPM functionality instead of using old EVDRE reports or EPM functions as you both suggest; I know that. However, our business is reluctant to start that initiative if we don't need to as we have some very complex reports that would take a long time to re-engineer.

• For example, one of our workbooks has 21 worksheets and several worksheets contain multiple EVDRE reports... all of which are interconnected.
• Another example report has several thousand EPMRetrieveData requests on multiple sheets to produce specific data in specific cells to be linked to other sheets.
• We have tens (if not hundreds) of reports or input templates that would need to be converted.

I'm trying to understand if we need to convert them... or when we will need to convert them. (ignoring performance reasons to switch)

Our primary concern is with EVDRE as it certainly seems to be phasing out... but we'll have similar concerns with the EPM functions coming up too. I haven't found clear direction documented from SAP...

• example statement they COULD say: "EVDRE reports will not load in BPC 11.0 or BPC Optimized".

If that statement was true, we'd better understand timing requirements for change before changing our BPC landscape again and know whether we should rebuild these reports now, or if it can be done later.

Does that better understand what I'm asking or what information I'm looking for? I appreciate your feedback and advice.

[former_member186338]

"I haven't found clear direction documented from SAP" - not sure you will find clear directions!

You are not forced to upgrade to BPC11 etc...

May be at some moment the EVDRE support will be dropped, hard to predict!

You have time to recreate reports one by one with native EPM reports. As a bonus you will get performance improvements.

[lucas_costa3]

EV functions were never meant to be used with new reports in 10.x versions. What SAP supports is the usability of migrated reports from 7.x versions.

E.g.: if you use the migration tool, the reports would work in 10.x versions but still with EV functions instead of EPM functions.

The recommendation for new reports in standard models is to use EPM Addin. So if you could spend some time manually migrating those reports would give the best performance/usability.