Business Objects(BO) Reports & Data Base access-Beginners Tutorial-1

Now coming to our Beginners tutorial-1,  Once you open the BO, the first step is to connect to the Database. so lets start our journey from connecting to a source. Btw, following are Some important features you have to read on before jumping to the next step.

Business Objects like any other Reporting tool, can access from different databases. Although SAP mainly provides the business warehouse model of integrating all SAP owned tools, it is still rich in accessing data from databases of all major players like Oracle, Teradata, DB2 etc.
Business Objects Reports can access Data from:

• Relational Databases (RDBMS), such as ORACLE, Microsoft SQL Server, Informix, and IBM DB2.
• Multidimensional (OLAP) databases, such as Microsoft OLAP Services, Hyperion, Essbase, and ORACLE express.
• Text files and spreadsheets.
• Packaged applications such as SAP.
• Virtually any data source using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) procedures.

Ok, Now the question is, How do we access data from Business Objects? 

Business Objects,BO has a rich graphical user interface (GUI) which will help you connect to data sources. Using this GUI, you need to build a data provider. Your next question is.

How to Build a Data Provider in Business Objects?

You can build a data provider in 2 different ways.

1. You can Integrate the Web Intelligence Java Report Panel into your application
2. Build a data provider manually with REBean classes

Integrate the Web Intelligence Java Report Panel into your application:

The Web Intelligence Java Report Panel is the standard method for users to create data providers and edit queries.

You can use the implicit JSP request object (javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest) to get the values for some of these parameters. For example, you can use request.getServerName and request.getServerPort to populate the Server and Port parameters.
Note: Some parameters are optional depending on what you are doing with the applet. For example, if you are creating a new document, you do not need to provide a storage token.

Since it is pretty basic, I am not touching much on that and also bo official site has this information. so , For more on this, you can refer to Business Objects site