How to setup SAP HANA SQL reference web search wit...

lbreddemann · ‎06-20-2012

UPDATE, 04.09.2017
UPDATE: The HANA documentation has been improved, extended and overhauled a couple of times since the last update to this blog nearly four years ago. For a while, the more current changes to the platform hosting the online documentation made it impossible a lot harder to set up and use the "search in the browser" method described in this blog. Heated and long winded discussions (SAP Help Portal tries to go "darknet") and SAP idea place entries (another soon-to-be-retired platform) eventually led to a solution. So, as my colleague laura.nevin points out in her blog post, the URL to be used for the HANA 2 SP02 documentation from now on is: `site:help.sap.com/viewer/4fe29514fd584807ac9f2a04f6754767/2.0.02/en-US/` At the time of this update, the corresponding URL for 1.0.12 (for HANA 1 SPS12) does not seem to be indexed by the google crawler. I will address this with the team but do not expect that much will be changed for the HANA 1 stuff anymore.
UPDATE, 28.10.2013
UPDATE: ~~As the SQL reference had been integrated into the standard SAP HANA help site, the base URL for the web-search changed.~~ ~~Please use http://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site:help.sap.com/saphelp_hanaplatform/helpdata/ to access the new documentation.~~ ~~While the old pre SP06 documentation is still available at http://help.sap.com/hana/html/index.html no updates will be released there.~~

And Hi there once again!

After a while of using the ever improving SAP HANA reference documentation I found one thing specifically annoying:
there is no easy searchable SQL reference available.

Sure, there is the reference documentation available on http://help.sap.com/hana_appliance but the HTML version lacks a search feature and always having the PDF version open just to be able to quickly look up a command is too much effort for me.

Therefore I made my own HANA SQL reference search...

OK, not really, but I setup the search functions of the Internet browsers so that they would use Google to search just in the HTML version.

Here's how:

For FIREFOX

For the Firefox setup I simply created a OpenSearch XML descriptor file with this content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<OpenSearchDescription xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/"

      xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">

  <ShortName>SAP HANA SQL</ShortName>

  <Description>Search SAP HANA SQL reference documentation</Description>

  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>

  <Url method="get" type="text/html"

      template="http://www.google.com/search?q={searchTerms}+site:help.sap.com/hana/html/"/>

</OpenSearchDescription>

saved it as "hana_search.xml" in the folder "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins" and restarted Firefox.
Since then I have this little entry up in my search box:

For GOOGLE CHROME

For Google Chrome I simply right clicked on the address bar and opened the "manage search providers" menu.
In there I just had to enter a name, a shortcut and the URL for the search like this:

Name: HANA SQL
Shortcut: hsql
URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site:help.sap.com/hana/html/

Now I can just type right into the address bar stuff like "hsql alter table", hit ENTER and get the search result right back.

For MS InternetExplorer

Finally for MS IE I used the site http://www.enhanceie.com/ie/searchbuilder.asp, entered the following string into the text box in step 3 (URL😞
https://www.google.com/search?q=TEST+site:help.sap.com/hana/html/

For the name I chose "SAP HANA SQL" this time and clicked on the "Install" button.

After accepting the installation dialog window, I now have a search engine entry for SAP HANA in my address bar.

I'm pretty sure that there are much better and more professional ways to set this up, but that's what I figured out with a short amount of time and Google...

Hope you find it as useful as I do.

Cheers and have fun with HANA SQL coding!

Lars