Tips - SAP HANA Auto-Documentation - Excel Way

[murali_balreddy2]

SAP provides an Auto Documentation tool in the HANA Studio to document the models in a PDF.



Sometimes this auto-generated PDF does not provide all the information in a useful format or in a customized way to prepare a document like a mapping document.

 

 

 

This blog briefly explains how to generate a detailed mapping document using the XML data and an Excel-Macro based generator.

 

In HANA studio, every calculation view comes with its generated XML.

 

• Display the View XML by selecting from the toolbar

 

 

 

• Save the View XML in a .XML format

 

 

 

• Using this attached Excel macro based document generator, provide the saved XML file and generate the mapping document

 

 

• An Excel-based mapping document is generated with individual worksheets for different information (eg: Semantic Layer, Filters, Joins, Unions, Ranks etc)

 

 

 

 

This document generator generates a document for a 30+ node view in under 30 seconds.

 

Example of a generated document

 

 

Alternatively, If you are skeptical about using the macro, open the XML in Excel as a read-only workbook



and  utilize the XML data in a pivot table, to generate different reports



 

 

Hope this tool and tip helps you.

 

Note: Sometimes the XML file has to be edited. When using star joins, I have noticed the XML is not well qualified like "" for schema name as shown in this example XML line

<entity>#//"SAP_HANA_DEMO".sap.hana.democontent.epm.data::SO.Header</entity>

Removing the double quotes from the schema name "SAP_HANA_DEMO" enables Excel to process the XML.