Accessing PowerDesigner Internal Object Identifiers

[Former Member]

Hi,

I am a fairly novice SAP PowerDesigner (PD) user. Our organization uses PD to for Conceptual, Logical, and Physical Data Models.

We recently undertook an initiative to build a custom user-friendly web-based Data Governance tool, external to PowerDesigner. We are hoping to export our Logical Entities, Attributes, and LDDs from PD to the Data Governance tool, and then keep them in-sync going forward with changes PD. Same goes for the Physical Tables, Columns and PDDs.

The challenge is that once we have the PD objects in the Data Governance Tool, we are extending the properties, plus linking them to other PD objects and/or non-PD objects. We cannot do a complete re-load each time. Any new PD objects should be inserted into the Tool, but updated PD objects should be updated in-place within the Tool.

How would we link the PD Objects to the Tool Objects? We can't use the Object Name, because it might change. The Object Code also seems to change when the Name is changed - can this be disabled? Or Is there an internal PD object identifier we might be able to access, which would never change?

Other suggestions?

Thanks....

[GeorgeMcGeachie]

You need the ObjectID property, Michael. values will look like this:

72E72A5F-D174-4825-9F72-A67009C8D003

[Former Member]

Yes, that appears to be what we need.

How can we access this ObjectID property? I don't see it in either the Reports Wizard or List Reports Wizard properties, which are the 2 mechanisms we had hoped to use to get the metadata out of PD.

[GeorgeMcGeachie]

You need to create a computed extended attribute, which can be accessed via a List Report or Report. In the Get script for the Extended Attribute, set the value to obj.ObjectID

[GeorgeMcGeachie]

As an alternative, you can extract JSON from PowerDesigner to import into your governance tool using GTL templates in a model extension - I've done that recently for importing into Collibra

[former_member1102819]

@georgemcgeachie and/or @spongebob2007, I see you've mentioned Collibra above. We are basically trying to integrate PD and Collibra simply to keep table/view descriptions in sync. We plan to maintain a central LDM or PDM in PD that contains the base tables used in our EDW. If a description is modified in either environment, the other will get the upsert automatically. We plan on using the PD Model repository. Are you aware of any documentation on how to accomplish this or do you have any knowledge if this is even possible?

Thanks,

John Stinnett

[GeorgeMcGeachie]

@John Stinnett - last time I saw a Collibra roadmap, they were planning to include a PD-Collibra connector in their marketplace around about now. I know it's possible, I helped them build one for a client of theirs last year :). The bad news is that this connector (at least, the one we built last year) is triggered manually:

• upload from PD by running a model export in PD to create a JSON file from the model, which is posted to a location monitored by Collibra
• download from Collibra by generating an export file, and using a VBscript program to create a model in PD, which the user then would manually compare with the original model in PD

You can check the automation options by looking at the stuff that comes with PD - look in this folder:

C:\Program Files\SAP\PowerDesigner 16\Ole Automation