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Author's profile photo Abhishek Jain

Workaround – Pulling HANA Views description into SAP Data Services

There is one issue I come across when I was building interfaces for third party components from S/4 Hana. When we add a description of columns in views as labels they wouldn’t get populated as descriptions in SAP Data Services. Refer below screenshots to understand the problem in more details.

 

Problem Replication Scenario:-

 

Below is the screen shot from HANA view.

 

 

 

Below is the screen shot from BODS

 

 

Some findings:-

 

When I Checked the view by consuming in SAP BO Webi report I was able to see the Labels there.

 

 

 

When we use Tables not views from S/4 HANA their labels will get populated as descriptions.

 

 

 

Resolution/Workaround/Solution:-

 

After working with the team and different hit and try of experts from HANA and Data Services I was able to come to know that to get a description from the views of HANA database we need to update the metadata of the view by executing SQL script example.

 

COMMENT ON COLUMN “_SYS_BIC”.”acan.mdi.interface/MATERIAL_INTER_2″.MANDT IS ‘XXXXXX’;

 

Instead of ‘XXXXXXX’ in the above SQL we can write the description we want to put for the column MANDT of MATERIAL_INTER_2 view. This way we have to write SQL for each column in view and then execute it.

After the successful execution of the scripts we need to reimport the view in SAP BO Data Services and finally, we will be able to see the description which was added as comment in the metadata fo views

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      4 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Raghunathan Balasubramanian
      Raghunathan Balasubramanian

      This is very useful.

      Author's profile photo Benedict Venmani Felix
      Benedict Venmani Felix

      Hello Abhishek,

      I remember having the same problem way back in 2014 and using the COMMENT ON COLUMN option to try and fix it 🙂 . Its sad to know that this issue still persists.

      I said 'try' because, we did it in development and once the views were transported to QA and activated, the comment columns would be blank again 🙁 . We had to do that in every system across the landscape Hope you don't have that problem now.

      Author's profile photo Abhishek Jain
      Abhishek Jain
      Blog Post Author

      Yes, Ben, you are right. This problem still persists. Even if we are doing changes in view and activate it all the comments will go away. So the bottom line is 2014 story is continued in 2017 as well.

      Author's profile photo Benedict Venmani Felix
      Benedict Venmani Felix

      I have a vague memory of editing the  model xml and adding the column labels. I don't remember if we were successful doing that. It was 3yrs ago 🙂