We were set to upgrade from 4.3 SP02 Patch 8 to 4.3 SP03 Patch 5 this coming weekend. Today we came across the issue described here.
3381739 - Free Hand SQL (FHSQL) with prompt returns no data in Web Intelligence Document on first refresh (SAP login required)
I guess it is on to Patch 8 (first 4.3 SP03 patch to fix the issue) since I am not to keen on taking the first release of 4.3 SP04 which will be release within a couple of weeks.
I am glad we stumbled across this, but disheartening still.
Seems a pretty major issue to let pass through pre-release testing. Their quality control seems to be really be lacking with 4.3.
Hi nscheaffer,
I can confirm that this has been fixed on patch 8. I can give you the history of this if you’re interested as I logged this issue with SAP. Note that we support multiple DB’s and noticed it with Oracle with Free-hand SQL based proc calls. The note doesn’t specifically mention Oracle so could well be an issue with all DBs but we only use Oracle in this way.
The original issue was that we noticed that following our upgrade from 4.2 to 4.3 we noticed that our procs were running twice. This became apparent as one of the horrible legacy reports which used to take 30 minutes to run were suddenly taking an hour to run. This was confirmed by checking our audit table (not BO audit) which was logging both runs.
We reported this and it eventually got patched but the patch was broken. The patch fixed the issue of it running twice but it turned into an issue where the prompt values were based on the default values in the @prompt syntax instead of what was passed into the parameter screen. This only affected the first refresh after opening a report but was an issue for us as users may think that there was genuinely no data which would be unacceptable for us.
Sorry for the boring story but I just wanted to reassure you that 4.3 SP3 Patch 8 has indeed resolved the issue for us. The fix will also apparently be in the imminent 4.3 SP4 as I understand it but will be checking that.
We haven’t actually upgraded yet (we are still on 4.3 SP3 Patch 1 which has the running twice issue). We were essentially blocked until now so extremely glad they’ve fixed it for us.
Steve
That is some great background information.
Thanks
I doubt the supposed big feature-offensive SAP has announced for BO 2024/5,
with these few BO-developer resources available 
They are trying to patch up the sinking BO ship before customers make even more serious efforts to move to Power BI.
(fortunately it’s not that easy to move and some BO features are still awesome)
We are finally updating PROD-server from Patch5 to Patch8 this week, so TEST-server is now available for updating/playing with SP4 
I’ve definitely noticed a drop in quality since 4.2. In December we upgraded from 4.2 to 4.3 SP02 Patch 7. Initial testing went ok but when we released to production we found that many users were getting frequent sporadic errors in WebI. We opened an incident and was told it’s a known bug, fixed in Patch 12. We installed Patch 12 in a sandbox and none of our program objects work. Support is telling us to go to SP03. We’re stuck.
We did upgrade to 4.3 SP03 Patch 8 two weeks ago. We have only encountered only one issue so far.
Years ago when free-hand SQL was not available (or maybe I just did not know about it) I built a handful of WebI reports using custom SQL. With this upgrade any reports with prompts in the custom SQL would not display those prompts correctly when refreshed. For example, Instead of prompting for an account number and date range it would instead prompt for just one date value.
The fix turned out to be quite simple.
We just had to open up each report, go into the custom SQL, save it without even making any changes, and finally save the report. That’s all. Fortunately, we run some third-party software that allowed to quickly come up with a list of reports that use custom SQL. Without that, we would have had a much harder time resolving this issue.
It does make you wonder how this can happen. Some of the affected reports were created 12 years ago and have been working as expected all this time. And we did not make a massive leap with this upgrade; we had been on 4.3 SP02 Patch 8.
Not worth fretting about too much. Just got to move on.
Noel
after only 3.5 years since the release of 4.3, SAP has finally fixed a bug (with SP3 Patch 900) in displaying the schedule- dates in german notation 
