The Performer Suite works with entities from the SAP BW system. To provide a fast selection of entities of all types the entities are stored in the application's database itself.
After installing the software your database is empty, so it has to be synchronized with your target SAP systems. This implies that the entities and some of their properties (timestamp, description, InfoArea, etc.) are captured into the database of the Performer Suite.

As soon as a documentation is exported, the details will directly be read from SAP using BAPIs or RFC Function Modules. This means it is not possible to create technical documentation without being connected to your SAP system.

Your SAP Synchronization is necessary in the following cases:

After your first installation, when your database is still empty
If in the meantime new entities have been created in your SAP
If meanwhile descriptions in your SAP have been changed
When a selection of entities by date of change is done (to update the dates of change that are saved in your database)

A Synchronization is relevant for the selection of entities because during selections the entities are read from your database.

On the other side, every documentation-related information is read directly from your SAP system, this way your documentations will always be up-to-date, even when no SAP synchronization has been performed before.
Exception: Descriptions of entities and some InfoObject details (Type, Length, Reference Characteristic) are still read from your database.
Those properties are usually not changed in your SAP and it improves the performance of the document generation when those details are read from the Performer Suite database instead of from your SAP.

Implementing the application with a central database will eliminate the need for each user to carry out the synchronization individually.

The synchronization is done in the following steps:

The user is able to select the SAP BW areas to be synchronized. Selecting a specific area has the advantage of quickening the synchronization process, but then, only those entities from the selected area are synchronized.

Regarding ABAP stack the user should restrict the synchronizing to those elements that are assigned to customer-specific Packages e.g. Y*, Z*, or /* to avoid the synchronization of SAP-owned packages. Due to the volume of data, it is not possible to synchronize all the entities of the ABAP stack from SAP. So it is important to determine which packages should be synchronized based on the required functionality (Reports and Function Modules).

There are two possibilities for the synchronization of entities:

Synchronization using SAP standard Function RFC_READ_TABLE
Synchronization using customer-specific Function Module

It is not necessary to use a customer Function Module when synchronizing, but it can help to speed up the synchronization process (especially for Quick synchronization).

Next, the user should select a language (or a combination of two languages) for the synchronization of entity-descriptions.

The first synchronization should be a Standard synchronization of all elements (Button: 'Standard Update'). This synchronizes the Performer Suite with all the applicable entities in the SAP system.

After the 'Standard Update', the user may choose a 'Quick Mode' This will only read those elements that have a “date of change” that is higher than the timestamp of the last synchronization.
If an entity that was once synchronized in the Performer Suite system has been deleted in SAP, this change can only be recognized using the 'Standard Update'.
The 'Standard Update' will detect this change and mark the element as deleted. This entity will continue to remain in the database but no documentation can be created for it.

Tables

The synchronization of SAP tables requires adding either development class or single tables manually.

All four fields are combined with an and-conjunction.

Explanation of the search example below:
Search all AAA* tables (but not table "AAA_KEYS") in development class ZP* (but not in dev class "ZPOC").

Because the table documentation uses SAP standard Function Module RFC_READ_TABLE there are the following restrictions regarding the possibility to create table documentations:

Tables containing fields of data type FLTP are not supported
The max. number of bytes per dataset is 512 bytes

When adding a table for synchronization the application validates the table structure. If the table is not valid it will not be added to the synchronization.

New SAP entities which are not yet synchronized can be selected for documentation using the Manual input of not synchronized entities.

Other topics you might be interested in:

Page:

Automated Synchronization (User Manual v21.1)
Page:

AutomationTool (User Manual v21.1)
Page:

BO Synchronization (User Manual v21.1)
Page:

BW Synchronization (User Manual v21.1)
Page:

HANA Synchronization (User Manual v21.1)
Page:

SAC Synchronization (User Manual v21.1)

Browser not supported