This blog is a continuation of my previous blogs in the SAP BI version Management series. SAP BI VMS options, features, installation and configuration has been covered in previous blogs. This blog will focus primarily on SAP BI VMS options – Add to VM, Checkin and History.

Launch Version Management

To Launch Version Management, go to CMC -> Manage -> Version Management

Version management will have the VMS options on top, object type selection on left, folder view in the central panel.

A sample VMS workflow will look like this:

A detailed explanation of these terminologies and workflow was covered in a previous blog of this series

Add to VM

When an object is added to version management, it will store a copy of the current CMS version in the Version Management system.

A sample Webi report has been created and saved in the platform

Launch Version Management -> Select the report -> Click “Add to VM”

System will prompt the user to enter a comment

Before adding report to VM

• CMS version and VMS version will be 0
• Only “Add to VM” option will be available

After adding report to VM

• CMS version and VMS version will be set to 1 (base version)
• Other VMS operations will be available. However, Add to VM will get greyed out

After this step, report is added to VM repository and multiple versions can be maintained.

CheckIn

Checkin is the process of committing all changes to the Version Management System. This will update current VMS version and will store a copy of previous version in the VMS repository. So that old version can be restored at anytime, if needed.

Webi report created in the previous step is now updated – A proper title has been added and changes are saved to CMS. Users who execute the report from Launchpad will see the updated report.

Since the report has been changed, CMS version will be updated. This will show an exclamation mark icon under “CMS version”

Now select the report and select “Checkin” option

Checkin will display a prompt to enter comment. Enter comment and click “Ok” to save.

Once checkin is complete, both CMS version and VMS version will be updated in VMS.

Any further changes can be stored to VMS using CheckIn and CMS/VMS version numbers will be incremented by 1.

History

As the name implies, history option will show the checkin history of the object. This is very helpful to track changes and restore specific versions, if needed

Within Version Management -> Select Report -> Select “History”

This will bring up the checkin history of the report

Message field in the history window will show the comments entered during checkin process. This is useful to track changes in the report.

History window has its own menus

• Get Version – Will replace CMS version with the selected VMS version (Useful for reverting to older versions in CMS)
• Get Copy of Version – Will create a copy of the selected VMS version and store that as a new report in CMS
• Export Copy of Version – Will export the select VMS version and make it available for download
• Compare – This option is specific for jobs and will show changes among two versions of a job

To restore previous version of report to CMS version, select previous version in the history and click “Get version”

This will replace active version on CMS with older version of the report.

When executing this report on Launchpad, it can be noticed that changes made to Title has been reverted now.

To revert to version 2, go back to History on VMS and select VMS version 2 and select “Get Version”. That will restore CMS version to Version 2.

Hope this helps!

Stay tuned for more blogs on SAP BI Version Management.

Read more about blogs from SAP BI Version Management category here. Got questions? Click here to get in touch.