SAP Data Intelligence Cloud – Creating Documentation for Custom Operators and Graphs

This blog post is written in collaboration with the SAP HANA Database & Analytics, Cross Product Management team

Good documentation is crucial to maintenance and development of your SAP Data Intelligence assets. Within the SAP Data Intelligence Modeler, the example Graphs and standard Operators contain documentation ready for us to reference

We can view Graph Documentation using the Show Documentation button when no Operators are selected

However, when we create our own operators and graphs, we’d like to be able to create our own documentation to reference in the same way

For custom operators, we can create documentation by right clicking the operator then clicking Edit

Editing our custom operator

We can now click on the Documentation tab to create our own documentation

Writing our custom operator documentation

All text within the documentation uses Markdown formatting. Try the below text to get a handle on the basic syntax, then press Save

# Sample Main Heading

## Sample Sub Heading

Sample text in *italics* and **bold**

> Sample blockquote

- Sample bullet point

1. Sample numbered list
2. Sample numbered list

Save our operator documentation

Now we’re able to view the documentation for our custom operator in the same way as any other operator

Viewing our custom operator documentation

We can also create documentation for our custom graphs, although we need to use another method to do so

First, we want to select the Repository tab along the left hand side of the Modeler. From there, we want to double click to open the Graphs folder, followed by the folder that contains our graph

The folder for our Graph in the Repository

In this folder we’ll find the graph.json file that describes our graph. In order to create our documentation, we want to right click on the folder that contains our graph, and select Create File

Create file

In order for our new documentation file to be recognized by SAP Data Intelligence, we want to name it README.md

Creating README.md

We can then double click our new README.md file to edit the documentation from within the Modeler. For now we’re using the same sample documentation as we did for our custom operator

Saving our documentation

Now that we’ve added some sample text to our documentation, we can check our new sample graph documentation within the Modeler using the Show Documentation button

Viewing our sample documentation

Throughout this blog, we’ve seen how we can both view and create documentation for our custom Operators and Graphs

I hope this blog post has been useful, and I welcome any comments or questions below

Note: While I am an employee of SAP, any views/thoughts are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer