Learn your BW in hard way

Useful information about BW system is spread into several tables in the system as itself. That’s usual case. Skilled BW guy knows where to look in order to lookup information that is needed. It is common to know basic tables with IOs (RSDIOBJ), reports (RSRREPDIR), cubes (RSDCUBE), DSOs (RSDODSO), process chains (RSPCCHAIN) etc. More technical BW guy would also know where to find information about basic BW system settings (tables RSADMINA, RSADMINS, RSBASIDOC, etc).

Well we all know that digging into the tables is not very convenient. Therefore I was wondering either there is a functionality that could reveal those system’s secrets at least a bit. More-less by accident I came across one interesting function module. Its name is RS_SYSTEM_INFORMATION and it basically does provide what I just described above. Let’s have a look on it in more detail.

The module has one import parameter which is optional. You do not need to use it and you get (depending on your system) following output:

What we get is basically set of different information in one place related to: BW backend server version and its highest level of Support Package, HTTP(s) prefixes, either SAP Portal is connected, either information broadcasting is available, server code page, BEx web runtime, RFC destinations (Portal), URL prefixes (web reporting, JAVA based BW-IP Modeler) and ports, workbooks, system category, etc. In addition there is information on BW's frontend requirements from table Parameters of table RSFRONTENDINIT - BW's frontend requirements: