Here ya go…upgraded from R3 with major issues (a living list…will update as needed):
GHX R4 Problems…
1. Bigger dataset reports set to save as CSV fail. Same Report scheduled to save as WebI succeeds.
a. Even smaller reports set to save as CSV in R4 are 30x times longer to finish than R3. Database trace shows the large query completed in one minute. Fails after ~ an hour in R4.
b. Found sapjvm out of memory errors in logs, increase tomcat setenv.sh, still cannot resolve.
c. In R3, finish just fine and did for years.
d. OPEN ISSUE, we need this fixed ASAP. Open ticket with SAP.
2. SDK promptutil deprecated in R3, dropped entirely in R4 with no alternative.
a. RESOLVED ISSUE: SAP support sent us the work around, uncompile promptutil from R3. Still did not work…but…
b. MORE: Using the SAP provided workaround it still did NOT work with @Prompt unless it was this format; @Prompt(‘Verbiage’,‘A’,mono/multi,free,[not_]persistent). If we had …,[not_]persistent,[default],User:0) it failed. Additionally…we had trouble with DATE @Prompts. Our solution…use either @Variable or @Prompt(simplest form)…and if Date then to_date(@Variable…) would work. May have been some in-between here, but this works so we’re going with it.
3. SAP ODBC layer quit working after two weeks.
a. Discovered the app was updating the odbc.ini file, adding QEWSD line which nullifies the entry for licensing. Even though there was no (obvious) mention of this in installation documentation, weve retired our ODBC 3rd party solution because we saw this available in R4.
b. RESOLVED ISSUE: chmod the odbc.ini file so it can’t be updated.
4. QaaWS queries originally ran fine, then suddenly they quit working and cannot be edited nor new ones created.
a. OPEN ISSUE, we need this fixed ASAP. Open ticket with SAP.
5. Instance Management from History: Why does the list constantly refresh itself blocking the ability to ORGANIZE instances!!!
a. OPEN ISSUE, extremely annoying. Just refresh the instance list when I click refresh
thats why the icon is there! I suggest this be changed in coming patch.
6. Recurring Reports that Miss a Window: Many Recurring reports did not execute at scheduled time. Just mysteriously did not run.
a. EOR Daily Verification report did not run Nov 15th thru 18th but then started again on the 19th with no intervention. BOE not stopped started or hiccupped during the 3 days it didnt run.
b. Nov 27th Both Launchpad and CMC will not launch login pages. System restarted. The reports that did not run in the window did not execute when system up and stable again. WHY?!?!??!?!?!?!?!? R3 they would have.
c. Restart of BOE after a Repository connection error (our fault) did not execute many of the missed Recurring schedules while some ran as expected.
d. OPEN ISSUE, why does this happen (less of a concern), will it happen again (huge concern). Why not even a failed instance. Needs to be fixed.
7. Chart Engine: Uses the first color of the pallet MOST of the time.
a. OPEN ISSUE, extremely annoying
8. CSV Delimiter options: Why would users lose as a quote delimiter option for CSV while scheduling. Replaced by just another ’ (single tick).
a. Some users cant schedule CSV reports anymore because we require quote delimiter. oh wait several days later its working again.
b. CLOSED ISSUE.unless it happens again. Annoying
9. Promotion Management: When Importing a file, the system appears to just hang, doesnt let the user know its busy.
a. CLOSED ISSUE. Were done migrating and promoting. Annoying.
10. All Publications had to be rescheduled. None succeeded after migration.
a. CLOSED ISSUE, Weve rescheduled all our Publications? Annoying
11. Java errors for all CSV formatted schedules in R4 that were fine in R3.
a. CLOSED ISSUE. we had to reschedule them all. Annoying
12. Prompt Date parameters in R3 did not require timestamp, R4 does.
a. CLOSED ISSUE. We had to reschedule. Annoying
13. Formatting Why would report formatting that worked great in R3 not work in R4?
a. WebI docs are returning whitespace columns in R4 and losing its alternating row background format, couldnt add objects back to the field. Saved the reports to xlsx, same Excel behavior. Save the report to xls, works fine, the whitespace apparent in WebI disappeared.
b. Found that a cell checked READ AS HTML was the cause of this. But why did either 1) the field come into R4 marked that way when it wasnt in R3 or 2) did a field marked that way in R3 save to Excel fine and 3) why did xlsx vs xls matter anyway and 4) Why didnt SAP support know this?
c. CLOSED ISSUE. Annoying
14. Double Click Action on Document: The change from Double click on Document Refreshed/Viewed the document in R3 to Open Last Instance in R4 is annoying.
a. We liked the other method better. Is this not configurable?
b. RESOLVED Found configuration point on BOB. Some Webi Reports open in PDF in BI Launch pad
I just wanted to update this post with a new lesson. We were a Solaris shop and had been for 10 years, so without thinking (mistake number one) we didn’t migrate to another platform. We discovered that XI R4 on Solaris is worthless after getting SAP Support Level 4 (finally) on the line and got them monitoring our app. He agreed, we had significant performance problems, and he couldn’t even find a clue as to why. He informed us that SAP develops BusObj on Windows and just ports the code. He suggested Linux or Windows…we are now migrated to Windows and our performance, both report execution and UI navigation, is 300-400% faster now. Most of the challenges listed above were platform agnostic. But biggest lesson of all…don’t install XI R4 on Solaris…and SPARC was not an option provided by SAP so I can’t speak to that.
charliebrown 
(BOB member since 2002-09-03)