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Author's profile photo Jan Zwickel

FAQ Modeling HANA Calculation Views in SAP Business Application Studio and SAP Web IDE

This blog is intended to provide answers to frequently asked questions around Calculation View modeling in Web IDE. Topics that are covered are for example what are projects, how do projects relate to containers, or how to manage access to objects.

The individual questions and answers can be found under this link.

When the document will be updated, I will add a comment on the blog post here, so please follow the blog to get notification of any updates.

For a general overview of the differences between modeling in Web IDE compared to HANA Studio have a look at this blog.

The topics of this blog are also relevant for modeling in Business Application Studio which was released in December 2020 as the HANA development tooling for SAP HANA Cloud. Have a look at e.g., this blog for an overview of developing Calculation Views in Business Application Studio which is in general very similar to developing in Web IDE.

For a general overview of the migration approach from the deprecated HANA repository to the new HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI) Calculation Views have a look at this blog.

See here for background information on concepts like “schema.configure” or “logical schema” that help to flexibly adapt the target objects of synonyms.

Several tutorials on calculation view modeling can be found here.

Workshop recordings on how to work with calculation views in SAP HANA Cloud can be found here:

starting HANA database development in HANA Cloud

Collaborative Database Development

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      11 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Halil Guenal
      Halil Guenal

      Nice blog. Thank you!

      Author's profile photo Cristina Bernardi
      Cristina Bernardi

      Hi Jan, hope you are well... How do I read the external generated hana views (created by BW/4HANA under _SYS_BIC) in web IDE?

      I've been trying to create synonyms referencing those views (for that I created a logical system name for _sys_bic and then a User provided service pointing to sys_bic) - which by the way I'm unsure if it's the right thing to do at this stage, but WebIDE complains about the fact that the logical schema is not referenced anywhere in the files.

      Bear in mind that I'm using HTA for HDI and the container was created in BW/4HANA.

      This seems to me a pretty common scenario among those who use BW/4HANA and develop calc. views, to be able to reference an external generated view in a custom calc. view, but I cannot find any documentation covering this scenario.

       

      Thanks in advance, Cristina

      Author's profile photo Jan Zwickel
      Jan Zwickel
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Cristina,

      from Web IDE perspective you can treat the Calculation Views in _SYS_BIC as any object in other schema (in general we do not recommend to use these old type of views in HDI views if there is not a good reason). So using a synonym would be fine.

      HTA for HDI, however, does not support references to objects in schema _SYS_BIC as this would prevent zero downtime options during upgrades. Therefore, HTA for HDI will not work with external views of BW as long as BW generates these old type of views.

      For ADSOs, building on the exposed SQL Views (SAP Note "2723506-External SAP HANA SQL View with SAP BW/4HANA 2.0") might be an option.

      Best,

      Jan

       

       

      Author's profile photo Sreekanth Surampally
      Sreekanth Surampally

      Hi Jan, Thank you for the blog on XSA FAQ. I would like to know, do we need to have Web IDE installed and connected to production system? in one of your FAQ, you said that, we don't connect Web IDE to Prod, if so, then how do manage the HDI containers in Production space run time. For example, how do I grant authorization on HDI container to database user?  Currently in Dev, I do this in DB explorer of Web IDE, by adding HDI container and then access Admin console -- > run the DI procedures to grant the HDI roles to classic DB user.

      Author's profile photo Jan Zwickel
      Jan Zwickel
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Sreekanth,

      even though Database Explorer appears as a kind of link in Web IDE it is not included in Web IDE.

      In other words you do not have to install Web IDE to make use of Database Explorer.

      If you want to navigate to Database Explorer without Web IDE you can for example, navigate to it from HANA Database Cockpit, or directly with the URL, or you navigate to your controller page: https://<host_name>:3<instance number>30 There you should see an entry like "hrtt-core".

       

      Best,

      Jan

      Author's profile photo Sreekanth Surampally
      Sreekanth Surampally

      Thanks Jan for the reply. But I navigate to the DB Explorer with URL or from Cockpit, I can only work on classic Database objects. But I can't add HDI containers which got deployed in my production space. firstly, is it something possible to do?  if yes, then am I missing any authorizations in production space?

      Author's profile photo Jan Zwickel
      Jan Zwickel
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Sreekanth,

      did you assign your user to the respective SPACE in which the hdi-service is running? You will only see the services that are running in your assigned SPACE.

      Having said that: you could also grant the hdi-roles via recent HANA Database Cockpit (Role Assignment). Also, you could grant the respective privileges to a dedicated database user and work with this database user.

      Best,

      Jan

      Author's profile photo Sreekanth Surampally
      Sreekanth Surampally

      Hi Jan, that makes sense. After giving the authorization in production space. I can do hdi container management in production now. Thank you.

      Author's profile photo Silas rocha
      Silas rocha

      Hello all, I have aproblem here, I can not anymore create or edit my calculation views in a hana database using hdi containers, the gráficas calculation view and many other are not being shown anymore in the sap web ide . Can someone help me to solve this ? I tested with the p user and the s user but I get the same error.

      Author's profile photo Jan Zwickel
      Jan Zwickel
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Silas,

      this does not sound like a question on modeling in Web IDE in general. Please open an incident at SAP support on component HAN-WDE-EDT-MOD for an on-premise issue and CA-WDE-EDT-MOD
      for an HANA Cloud issue. Please provide more details there: E.g.

      • which Web IDE version are you using
      •  it sounds like it worked before, what happened in between?
      •  you speak of "many other are not being shown" what are these others?
      •  what is meant with "not being shown": you don't see the design-time objects listed in the folders, or the editor does not open, or data preview does not work?
      •  what is a "p user" what is a "s user"?

      Best,

      Jan

      Author's profile photo Jan Zwickel
      Jan Zwickel
      Blog Post Author

      This is the list of changes in the linked FAQ document on HANA Modeling in Business Application Studio and Web IDE:

      • Enhanced section on how to refer in different systems to different objects (e.g., in a transporting scenario)  with the information that schema.configure can also be used with several schemas using one single user provided service

       

      • Enhanced information on how to deploy to a “reuse” container using Web IDE, added a section on how to easily trace the deployment process, and added a section on the question how to transition from on premise to HANA Cloud

       

       

       

       

      • Included information about how to revoke privileges that have been granted via .hdbgrants files

       

      21/07/07:

      • Added to section on how to deploy views whose definition have not changed, information on how to trigger a deployment of views when only the data sources outside of the container have changed. This offers a way to also check consistency with objects that are outside of  the current HDI container

       

      • Included information on how to list external objects which are used in a container

       

      21/09/27:

      • Added information about keyboard shortcuts for modeling actions
      • Described options how to set session variables such as client value for data preview
      • Included information about additional option to trace more detailed information into deployment log

       

      21/11/17:

      Link to an option to "extract" the design time files that have been deployed in an HDI container

       

      21/12/21:

      22/04/03

      22/09/28:

      • smaller clarifications
      • option of intermediate data preview without deploy authorization
      • support mode export in BAS
      • reading deployed objects in BAS

       

      23/07/27:

      • additional deployment tracing option via BAS preferences
      • how to deploy multiple individual objects in one deployment step