Database column descriptions in Sharepoint

Hi All,
my apologies if this is a stupid question but I'm somewhat of a n00b in Sharepoint so please bare with me.
I'm doing a reporting project (Data Warehouse, SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular model) and the number of available columns to use in the reports is getting quite big. To make things easier for the end users I'd like to create a documentation library
which basically consists of key/value-pairs where the Key is the name of the column that can be used in the reports and the value would be the description. I would also prefer to have a few additional attributes also to describe the columns better.
The most important thing however is that the keys are searchable and when testing this (using standard sharepoint lists) I've had some issues with nothing showing up in the search results.
What should I do here?
Lumbago
www.thefirstsql.com

Hi John and Christian,
Thanks for your input and thoughts about this problem.
Since I am using the 'Externalize Display Names' and 'Externalize Descriptions' functionality, I'm actually already that far that I have the names and descriptions stored in a table (W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G table from Oracle BI apps) and the column name and description are stored in session variables, in the following format:
Session variable for column name = VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.CN_Presentation_Catalog_Name_Presentation_Table_Name_Presentation_Column_Name)
Session variable for description = VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.CD_Presentation_Catalog_Name_Presentation_Table_Name_Presentation_Column_Name)
So when I have a report like this:
Column 1____Column 2____Column 3
Then I would need to create 6 extra columns, using the session variables:
Column 1____Name of Column 1____Description of Column 1____Column 2____Name of Column 2_____Description of Column 2____Column 3___Name of Column 2_____Description of Column 3
And then I could create a narrative view like this and add this to my report.
@2: @3[br/]
@5: @6[br/]
@8: @9[br/]
(And I could use HTML to create proper alignment.)
This could be a solution, but I don't like the fact that
1) I need to know all the names of the session variables by hard,
2) I need to create separate columns for each column,
3) I need to create a narrative view by hand.
I was hoping that there was a sort of trick to easily get the description of the column in my report, ideally without using separate columns.
If you have any further ideas, I'm very interested.
Regards,
Stijn
Edited by: Stijn Gabriels on Nov 14, 2008 10:22 PM

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----- Original Message -----
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
For more information about JATO, please visit
http://developer.iplanet.com/tech/appserver/framework/index.jsp
>
>
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----- Original Message -----
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Subject: Re: [iPlanet-JATO] Finding the database column length
Chidu,
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>>
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