Support for SAP variables

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Power BI supports connecting to both SAP Business Warehouse (BW) and SAP HANA. It is commonly the case that the SAP BW or SAP HANA objects being used have variables or parameters defined on them. For example, an SAP BW Infocube or SAP HANA Analytical View might have variables defined for country and year that restrict the data available to the selected country or year. Such variables might be defined as either required or optional in the SAP BW or SAP HANA source. An example of a parameter might be TaxRate, which determines the TaxRate that will be used in calculations.

Power BI Desktop will add support for such variables and parameters, for both SAP BW and SAP HANA, when importing the data and when connecting using DirectQuery. This allows the report author to set the values, such as the country and year to be used, that then restricts the data shown in the report to the selection made. The report author sets the values upon first connecting and can then change the selections later if required.

After the report is published to the Power BI service, it is not possible to change the selections made for the report in the Power BI service. As a result, all users who open the report would see the same data, reflecting the selections made by the report author.

For reports that use DirectQuery, we will be improving this by adding the ability for the users who open the report to make their own selection of these variables and parameters. For example, a user opening a report might choose to see data for France/2018, while another user opening the same report might choose to see USA/2017. The choices made by each user will be remembered and reused when they next open the report, much like slicer selections are today.

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