PowerDesigner Web Search Filter

[Former Member]

The new PowerDesigner Web portal is extremely impressive.  However the search is troubling and will probably prevent us from making the new portal available to business users.  Is there a way to filter the search at the server level to "simplify" the search results.  Currently there's way too much noise in returning indexes, foreign keys, domains, schemas and it would be downright confusing for a business user who's really just looking for a diagram, definition, or a table. 

Any ideas on how to limit the results to the basics? 

Thanks,

Ben

[GeorgeMcGeachie]

The topic here is providing access to metadata to various audiences, with the expectation that SAP will provide a solution that suits all users. Perhaps we're expecting too much here, and should look at alternative ways of accessing the metadata, in much the same way as we look for alternative ways of accessing the data produced by other business applications.

Of course, that means we have to do more product evaluations, and eventually spend more money, but the results could be worth it.

I've heard (but haven't seen) of organisations using graph databases to provide access to extracts of metadata - presumably not via direct access to the PD repository, so it may not be bang up to date, but that may not be an issue.

I was reminded of this today by this press release from a UK consultancy - graph data visualisation Archives | Data To Value. Of course, other tools are available .

[Former Member]

I definitely agree with you guys. Search is basically useless to business users. We have been compensating by keeping a set of static reports generated from the repository on the portal. That satisfies most business people. Have also been tinkering with a custom search that allows filtering on object types but that is still early stages.

Hopefully SAP-Sybase gets around to improving search at some point.

Bruce

[Former Member]

Agree with Ben, the portal is great!  Also agree that expanding the search functionality would really make this a much more powerful tool, for a broader audience (if Matt C or other members of the Product Team just so happen to be monitoring these submissions ;-).  Beyond being able to filter to certain types of objects, it would be very helpful to be able to limit the search to specific sub-directories (vs. the whole repository). Or let me know if the functionality is already there and I'm just missing it. Thanks!  -Marty