Scheduled Web Intelligence reports with Prompts no longer work after upgrade to SAP BI 4.0

I’ve currently been busy working on an upgrade from an SAP BOE 3.0 environment to the new SAP BI 4.0 environment. There are a few lessons that I have learnt while undertaking an upgrade and one that I have come across is in relation to Web Intelligence reports with schedules. What I have found is that the schedule no longer works once upgraded.

Not sure why this is, but digging on the Internet didn’t come up with anything. So I thought I’d try and reset the schedule for the reports one by one and this is when I came up with the next problem, I couldn’t set the prompt, whenever I tried to access the prompt details, I was presented with an awful java.lang.NullPointerException and the properties window would close. Unfortunately the error message is too generic and googling doesn’t help. I thought maybe the Java version was out of date, but that was not the case. I was also running SP5 with Fix Pack 4 which was the latest update so it couldn’t have been a bug that wasn’t fixed. I tried another installation and environment and still no luck.

I was about to give up and call it quits on the upgrade, but not one to give up, I thought I’d try something out of hope, similar to the usual reboot the PC when it doesn’t work – I decided to see if I opened the report and re-saved it over itself, if this would fix the problem. Guess what, this actually fixed the issue with not being able to access the prompts. I was now able to set the prompt and schedule the report. Of course this is a pain to do, but since I only had a small number of reports, I wasn’t too fussed.

So if you are experiencing a similar sort of issue after an upgrade to SAP BI 4.0, give this a try and see how it goes. If you have lots of reports, might be worthwhile looking into using the SDK to do this.