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CubeServ Naming Connvention Check
Efficiency improvement and quality assurance in SAP BW projects
Roland J. Merz
Managing Director / Vice Chairman
CNCC – CubeServ Naming Convention Check: Efficiency Improvement and Quality Assurance in SAP BW Projects
In the complex world of SAP BW projects, adherence to naming conventions is an often underestimated but essential aspect for success.
Why are naming conventions important in SAP BW projects?
Naming conventions serve primarily clarity and comprehensibility. A uniform system for naming objects makes it possible to recognize their purpose and meaning at first glance. This is particularly helpful for new team members and facilitates collaboration across the entire project team.
Furthermore, clear naming conventions significantly reduce the effort required for maintenance and support. In a large, complex system, similar or identical names can easily occur, leading to confusion and errors. Standardized names prevent such conflicts and ensure a consistent structure.
Another advantage is the facilitation of documentation and training. Standardized names make it easier to create documentation and convey knowledge within the team. New employees can be onboarded more quickly, which increases the efficiency of the team.
Automation and administration tools in SAP BW also benefit from consistent naming conventions. The implementation of scripts, reports, and other automation processes is made easier by clear and uniform names.
Is a mandatory check for naming conventions possible?
SAP does not offer an integrated function for a mandatory check of naming conventions. All repository objects in SAP, whether BW objects, DDIC objects, or ABAP objects, can be checked for compliance with naming conventions. This check can occur at the time of creation, modification, or release of objects.
To implement such a check, an appropriate enhancement must be implemented. This allows the objects to be checked not only for naming conventions but also for their assignment to the package structure.
Features at a glance
CubeServ offers with the CNCC a special tool that enables this naming conventions check. CNCC is flexibly configurable and allows arbitrarily many rules to be defined for different user groups and object types.
These rules can be based on simple ABAP patterns or on complex regular expressions.
Especially practical: CNCC allows embedding table-column variables into the naming conventions. This way, rules can be adjusted dynamically. Example: A rule contains the placeholder “ZCL_YC1_//T000_MANDT//”, which is replaced at runtime with the actual values from the table T000. This significantly reduces maintenance effort.
When creating a BW object in an earlier version of BW on HANA, the following error message is displayed:
In the new Eclipse environment, the error message appears as follows:
Application & Success Stories
CNCC was originally developed for internal quality assurance at CubeServ, but is now used by a multitude of customers, both on older SAP BW systems and on SAP BW/4HANA. For one customer, the tool was so successful that it was also introduced for their ERP systems. Particularly noteworthy is the use of “regular expressions”, which can be made accessible to inexperienced users with the help of tools like ChatGPT.
Note: Regular expressions are character strings based on syntactic rules that make it possible to describe sequences of characters. They offer significantly greater flexibility and performance compared to normal ABAP and SQL patterns.
Installation & Setup
CNCC is delivered as a small ABAP package and can be imported into the customer system without complications. After a concept for the naming convention rules has been defined, this can be set up in CNCC by either internal employees or CubeServ consultants. By activating the enhancement, the check is enabled – simple and fast!
In principle, CNCC works with all on-premise BW versions (BW on HANA, BW/4HANA).
Conclusion
Adherence to naming conventions is essential for the success of an SAP BW project. With the CNCC – CubeServ Naming Convention Check, a powerful tool is available that significantly increases the quality and efficiency of your projects. If you want to ensure that your naming conventions are consistently adhered to, this tool is the ideal solution.
If you are interested in using CNCC in your company, please contact us. Our experts will be happy to advise you.