Creating a delivery unit
Before we can create any of our developments per se, we have to do a little housekeeping. The very first thing to create is called a delivery unit. This object is basically a container, and is used to transport your developments from the development machine, through to quality and in to production without making any changes (and hence possibly avoiding unnecessary errors) in any machine other than development. It is the basic box used to transport objects together. For readers familiar with development in the SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or SAP Business Warehouse (BW) environments, it is the equivalent to the notion of transport order.
Note
This first step is not strictly obligatory; however, it is something you will need to do for nearly every development. It is part of the SAP HANA best practices for development.
From the Quick Launch panel, under Setup at the bottom, select Delivery Units, as you can see in the following screenshot:
The Delivery Units dialog will open. There might be some delivery units already present in the list—we'll create a new one for our development.
Just click on Create now to see the New Delivery Unit dialog.
Note
At this point you might receive an error stating that you cannot create a delivery unit because the content vendor is not defined for your SAP HANA system. If this is the case, close the two dialog boxes that are open and we'll define the content vendor.
In the Navigator panel, double-click on the system name to see the administration tab which will be placed alongside the Quick Launch panel. Select the Configuration tab. You will be presented with a list of configuration options. In the filter box, type vendor, to restrict the selection:
Note
Double-click on the System column, next to the word UNDEFINED, then type in some representative string to be the content vendor. The value does not actually have any meaning for SAP HANA, it just identifies, for a given delivery unit, who created it. Once you have entered a value, click on Save to see the results, which should look something like the following:
Note
Your value will now be present in the System column. You can at this point close the Administration tab. Now reopen the Delivery Units dialog, and click on Create once more to create our delivery unit.
The New Delivery Unit dialog asks for several pieces of information, as we can see in the following screenshot:
The only mandatory field is Name, and you can enter any meaningful (for you) value here. Something like BOOK might be appropriate. Delivery unit names can only contain capital letters (A-Z), numbers (0-9), and the underscore (_) character. If you attempt to type any other character, the system will warn you that your entry is invalid, and will deactivate the OK button.
The Vendor field is filled automatically from the content_vendor system configuration value. The other fields can be filled or not as you prefer; they are all optional. If you are building an application which you will ship to customers then the Version, Support Package Version, and Patch Version field will be useful to be able to detect which version your customers have installed when they call you for support.
Once you are done, click on OK to see your delivery unit listed alongside the others delivered by SAP, as we can see in the following screenshot:
You can now click on the Close button at the bottom of the Delivery Units dialog. Your delivery unit has been created.