How to enhance comments on BW/BPC live Connections in SAP Analytics Cloud with full name of the owner 

Introduction 

A very nice feature of commenting on BW/BPC live Connections in SAP Analytics Cloud was described by the blog of Gerd Schoeffl (https://blogs.sap.com/2023/04/27/comments-on-bw-bpc-live-connections-in-sap-analytics-cloud/ ). This feature is amazing, especially in the context of analytics. 

In my opinion one missing part of this new feature is to show the full name of the owner of the comment instead of the technical username from the backend. This blog is about how to enhance the commenting function in BW/BPC live Connections in SAP Analytics Cloud with the full name of the owner instead of the SAP BW system username. 

Setup and Objective 

The setup of the commenting feature was done as described in the blog already mentioned. In our case we enabled this on our BPC Live Scenario for our STEPZ Application (some insights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAoLGGwp58A) 

Commenting enabled in SAC and consumed by the commenting widget would look like this in our scenario.  

The name MNADEGGER is the technical username out of the linked SAP BW4/HANA system and not readable for users. 

Our objective is to show the first and last name out of the user address data already maintained in the backend, that can be spotted in SU01 

Solution Overview 

After some deep dive into SAC Request to SAP BW called when SAC is consuming document data, we found a way to enrich the response in a way that enables you to show custom text as comment owner. 

In class CL_BICS_INA_PROC_DATA_DOC we enhance the method PREPARE_DOC_RESPONSE with an enhancement point named ZPA_SAC_INA_ENH1. 

Within the exporting parameter E_T_DIRECTORY-FILES-VERSIONS[] the owner of the comment is returned as string (instead of CHAR12 before).  

At the end of the method we did a small enhancement and replaced the owner with the full name out of table USER_ADDR, carrying the information out of SU01. 

  

As a result, now the SAC Story is showing my full name as comment owner in the widget. 

Conclusion 

Enhancing the standard code in that case is a nice work around but hopefully a temporary one and should always be done with care. If standard code is changing (for instance due to an upgrade) this enhancement has to be adopted and/or is no longer possible. I hope that this small piece of coding will at some point in time become part of the standard, because showing the full name (or a custom version) makes a lot of sense.