BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.2 - How to change reference to SAP HANA views / package via .biapp file

[Former Member]

I'm currently working on a project that uses Design Studio 1.2 on top of SAP HANA. As in most projects a customer doesn't always have a HANA server for each environment like DEV, TST, Q&A, etc. This means that when using HANA views in Design Studio these Views are in different 'packages'. So in order to switch your Design Studio application from the Views in the 'DEV' package to the 'TST' package you need to go into the Design Studio client application and change the data source.

However this can be very cumbersome if you have invested a lot of time in setting up the correct initial view for each data source. After all changes the data source inside Design Studio resets the initial view. In my project we have over 10 HANA views so even that is what you want to be doing ;-).

I have been experimenting to check whether there is a different way of doing this. Design Studio allows you to save an application you have created locally (in this example the application is stored on the BI 4.1 platform). If you go to

You need to browse to a folder where the application will be saved. When you go to this folder you can see that Design Studio created a folder which contains 2 files.

The metadata.properties file contains simply contains some metadata 😉 but the interesting file is the content.biapp file. When you open this file with for instance notepad it contains the complete coding of your application.

All we need to do now is to find the area which contains the reference to the data sources used. Use a simple CTRL+F and search for 'DATA_SOURCE_NAME'.

You can change the value to match to correct package and save your changes!

Next step is to open the application via Design Studio. Click on Tools - Upload Local Application.

Browse to the .biapp file and select the folder where you want to save the application on the BI platform. You can also rename the file and change the description.

Please make sure that you properly test whether this will actually work in your specific situation as this is probably unsupported ;-).

If you have any comments or questions please let me know!

With kind regards,

Martijn van Foeken | Intenzz