Retrieving SAP BW objects metadata

About this task

This section shows you how to retrieve the metadata of the SAP BW Advanced Data Store Object, Data Source, Data Store Object, InfoCube or InfoObject objects using the SAP metadata wizard.

Before reading data from Data Source and InfoCube objects or writing data to direct updatable Data Store objects, you need to install some custom function modules on your SAP system. For how to install the modules, see the file readme.txt provided under the directory <Talend_Studio>\plugins\org.talend.libraries.sap_<version>\resources.

For more information about these SAP function modules, see SAP function modules shipped with Talend Studio .

Procedure

In the Repository tree view, right-click the newly created SAP connection and select Retrieve SAP BW metadata from the contextual menu. The SAP BW Table Wizard dialog box opens up.
In the Search in drop-down list, select the type of the SAP BW objects whose table metadata you want to retrieve.
In the Name field, enter the filter criteria for the object name to narrow your search if needed.
In the Description field, enter the filter criteria for the object description to narrow your search if needed.

Note that for the Data Store Object, InfoCube and InfoObject types, the filter criteria for the Name field and the Description field act together as an OR operator, that is to say, all objects that match either the filter criteria for the Name field or the filter criteria for the Description field will be returned.
For the Data Source, InfoCube and InfoObject objects, you can select the data type from the Type drop-down list to filter the search results.
For the Data Source objects, you can also enter the filter condition for the Data Source system name if needed.
Click Search and all the SAP BW objects that match the criteria will be listed in the table. Select one or more objects of interest by selecting the corresponding check boxes in the Name column and then wait until the Creation Status column values for all the selected objects become Success.

The tables and their schemas of the selected objects will finally be saved in the Repository and the tables of the unselected objects will be removed from the Repository if they already exist in the Repository.

For the InfoObject type objects, only the Attribute, Hierarchy and Text information can be extracted, and the number of the columns for each type of information is displayed in the Column Number field with the format A[X] H[Y] T[Z], where X, Y and Z represent the number of the columns for the Attribute, Hierarchy and Text information respectively.
Click Next to proceed to the next step.

All tables of the selected objects are listed in the Table Name area. For the InfoObject table, the type information is appended to the name of each table. You can remove the table(s) by clicking Remove Table.

Click Refresh Table and the latest table schema will be displayed in the Current Table area. You can modify the schema of the selected table in the Current Table area if needed.

Click Refresh Preview to preview data in the selected table if needed. The Refresh Preview button is not available when you search the Data Source type objects.
Click Finish. The tables and their schemas will be saved in the folder for the corresponding object type in the Repository tree view. You can now drag and drop any SAP BW table node onto your Job design workspace as an SAP BW component, with all metadata information automatically filled.

If you need to further edit an SAP BW table metadata, right-click the table node and select the corresponding item for editing the object from the contextual menu to open this wizard again and make your modifications.

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