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
- 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.