Hi Kris,
except for "The name of the HANA-artefact and the external view in the ABAP dictionary have to be identical" all you points above are valid.
Let me say a couple of words about the external views, especially those delivered by SAP.
Assume you have a development system landscape like DEH (development system with HANA as primary DB), DEO (development system with another DB), QCS (quality system, doesn't matter which DB but receiving the consolidated transports of DEH and DEO), PDS (productive system with non-HANA as primary DB and a secondary DB connection to HANA).
In this heterogeneous landscape you can create HANA content in DEH (respectively in the HANA underlying DEH) and external views via the ABAP Development Tools. You can transport the HANA content (e.g. via the HANA Transport Container) as well as the external views (and database procedure proxies) to the QCS system. The dictionary content, i.e. external views and database procedure proxies are active - otherwise the import/activation will fail - but you cannot consume them. Consumption of external views in the QCS system will lead to runtime exceptions as the underlying HANA artefacts are not accessible. However, since all the dictionary content exists, i.e. external views, database procedures, and the HANA transport container and all of them are active, you can further transport them to the productive system PDS. Once the external view is available in PDS and the HANA artefacts are available in the "side-car HANA" (assuming for simplicity you just use the connection to the DEH HANA), you can consume the external view respectively the underlying HANA view via OpenSQL in conjunction with the CONNECTION statement.
The described procedure explains how SAP has been able to deliver external views. In our system landscape, we have development systems on HANA as well as systems using non-HANA as primary database - how exactly depends on the product etc. So once the colleagues developed their HANA views and created the external views on such a development system on HANA, we can deliver external views. You can consume these external views:
- in a system using HANA as primary database (assuming of course you have also received the correct HANA content and everything has been activated properly)
- in a system using HANA as secondary database and using the CONNECTION statement in Open SQL
In scenario 1. you are able to create external views yourself via the ABAP Development Tools, while in the second scenario you can neither view nor maintain the external view.
For database procedure proxies, there is a method to create the DB procedure proxies programatically (see http://scn.sap.com/thread/3498161).
Hope this clarifies your questions,
Cheers,
Jasmin