Sometimes, in the course of your BW work, you will encounter a situation where the business requirement is to get the day of the last fiscal period. This is due to the fact that you want to populate, say calday infoobject, but the datasource only contains information in FISCPER format like 002.2008 for February 2008 for example.

So how do you overcome this? How to derive the last day in that period? Well the easy way is to use this built-in ABAP function in your transformation rules / or transfer rules etc:

CALL FUNCTION 'LAST_DAY_IN_PERIOD_GET'
EXPORTING
I_GJAHR = your_fiscal_year
I_MONMIT = 00
I_PERIV = your_fiscal_variant
I_POPER = your_fiscal_month
IMPORTING
E_DATE = output_last_day_of_period
EXCEPTIONS
INPUT_FALSE = 1
T009_NOTFOUND = 2
T009B_NOTFOUND = 3
OTHERS = 4
.
IF SY-SUBRC <> 0.
* MESSAGE ID SY-MSGID TYPE SY-MSGTY NUMBER SY-MSGNO
* WITH SY-MSGV1 SY-MSGV2 SY-MSGV3 SY-MSGV4.
ENDIF.

result = output_last_day_of_period.

So how to use this function? You need to replace the following fields which is highlighted in bold above, 'your_fiscal_year', and 'your_fiscal_month', should be replaced by the fiscal year and fiscal month respectively, in this case, you can derive this from fiscper from datasource. Remember, that 'your_fiscal_month', must be in 'financial format', meaning that its length is 3 and not 2 as usual. Remember to also populate the 'your_fiscal_variant', without this, the program will return with an exception error most likely.

This function will return 'output_last_day_of_period', and you can use this value to populate your calday in the transformation rules / transfer rules as you like!

Presto! That's easy isn't it?

It's been a while since my last post. Anyhow, today I would like to explain a bit about SAP BI 7.0 so called new features.

• New Transformation Rules - You heard that right, ladies and gentlemen, no more deciding whether this routine should be in update rules or transfer rules, now you can lump all those into one transformation rules which combine the best of both worlds. With the new 'end routine' and 'expert routine' features, you can further customize how data transformation is done.
• New DTP (Data Transfer Process Layer) - This is an additional layer on top of the 'normal' infopackage. So now, infopackage will move data to PSA level only. You will then use this DTP thingy, to move the data further to BW data targets, like infocube, ODS (they called this DSO now) or to infoobject. This is good in that you can debug more, but it will add additional layer especially for loading master data or text, which is in my opinion works better with the 'direct update' thingy in the previous version. But maybe SAP direction is in 'standardization', so no more differentiation between Flexible Update Rules or Direct Update I guess.
• New Remodelling Tool - So far I haven't used this yet, but they say, you can easily modify an existing infocube structure (with data in it) using this tool. Whether it will affect the data integrity of the infocube is another question.

Well there are many other features, or improvement you can found in SAP BI 7, but these are the major ones so far. And also, the BEx Query Designer and Analyzer is also different, but then Business Object is already in the picture, so expect this to be changed in the near future too.