Hi,

When doing the data extraction with datasource 0CRM_OPPT_H, I find that the value of field "duration" is different if we do the extraction on different time. Then I assume that the value of this field is calculated by the current date minus starting date. And then, with my assumption, I debugged the extraction process and find out how the value of Duration is calculated.

For opportunities with status "won" or "lost", the value of Duration is the difference between "Closing date" and "stage since". ("Duration" = "Closing date" - "stage since") Thus for this kind of opportunities, the value of Duration won't be changed no matter when you do the extraction.

But for opportunities with status "open", the value of Duration is the difference between "current system time" and "stage since". ("Duration" = "current time" - "stage since"). Thus for this kind of opportunities, the value of Duration is the difference between "changed at" and "stage since" when we do a delta load. And when we do the full load, the value of Duration is the difference between "current system time" and "stage since". That is also the reason why the extraction result of delta load and full load is consistent.

The coding used to calculate the value of duration is the following

(function module CRM_BW_OPPT_H_MAP)

249  PERFORM duration_determine

        USING

          ls_opport_h-phase_since

          ls_opport_h-expect_end

          ls_status-status

        CHANGING

          extract_data-duration.

form duration_determine

IF status_ip = gc_status-won OR status_ip = gc_status-lost.                << for the opportunity with status won or lost, the duration won't be changed no                                                                                                                      matter when you do the extraction

    duration_op = exp_end_ip - phase_since_ip.

   ELSE.

     duration_op = sy-datum - phase_since_ip.                                              <<  for the opportunity with status "in process", the duration is calculated                                                                                                                                by current time minus "stage since".

   ENDIF.

Where the value of "phase_since_ip" comes from ??

(function module CRM_BW_OPPT_H_MAP)

162   IF sy-subrc EQ 0.

       extract_data-startdate = ls_opport_h-startdate.

       extract_data-expect_end = ls_opport_h-expect_end.

       extract_data-curr_phase = ls_opport_h-curr_phase.

       extract_data-phase_since = ls_opport_h-phase_since.    <<   extract_data - phase_since is filled by ls_opport_h - phase_since

       extract_data-importance =  ls_opport_h-importance.

       extract_data-salescycle = ls_opport_h-salescycle.

       extract_data-type = ls_opport_h-type.

       extract_data-exp_revenue =  ls_opport_h-exp_revenue.

       extract_data-budget_bp = ls_opport_h-budget_bp.

       extract_data-probability = ls_opport_h-probability.

       extract_data-sys_probability = ls_opport_h-sys_probability.

       extract_data-status_since = ls_opport_h-status_since.

       extract_data-number_of_h = 1.

       extract_data-source = ls_opport_h-source.

       extract_data-forecast_rel = ls_opport_h-forecast_rel.

       extract_data-description_opp = ls_opport_h-description_opp.

     ENDIF.

Also, when do the calculation, just the working days are taken into account.

For example, the "stage since" time of a document is 2016.5.19, and the document is still open, then the duration should be 6.

This is the logic of extracting field "duration".

Hi,

When checking the result list of an interactive report, search or extraction, we may be surprised about why this transaction is here or why some kinds of transactions are not here, and then try our best to look for patterns. Oh, the transactions with *** status are filtered. Wow, just the transactions which were created before *** are in the result list.  Sometimes we are lucky enough and we find the real reason. But sometimes we are cheated by our eyes.

For example, we could find there are two incidents with status "withdrawn" and transaction type "ZIMN"in the system.

But when extracting data with datasource /crmbw/oltp_srv_request without any selection

I get the following

So the transactions with transaction type "ZIMN" could extracted, but the transactions with status "withdrawn" are filtered. And the transaction is filtered because of the status. Really? It seems to be that...

Let set a break point at class CL_CRM_REPORT_ACC_DYNAMIC -> database_access,

the datasource just extracts the documents, which meet the following selections.

1 CRMD_ORDER_INDEX~TEMPLATE_TYPE_IX = '' AND

2 CRMD_ORDER_INDEX~OBJECT_TYPE = 'BUS2000223' AND

3 CRMD_ORDER_INDEX~PARTNER_NO IN ('0000000171', '0000000214', '0000000216', '0000000218', '0000000220', '0000000222', '0000000224', '0000000227', '0000000228', '0000000229', '0000000230', '0000000231', '0000000232', '0000000252', '0000000252', '0000000262')

4 ( crmd_order_index~pft_5  = 'X' OR

5 crmd_order_index~pft_8  = 'X' )

And then compare those selections with the missing transactions, and find

for the missing documents, PARTNER_NO is not in ('0000000171', '0000000214', '0000000216', '0000000218', '0000000220', '0000000222', '0000000224', '0000000227', '0000000228', '0000000229', '0000000230', '0000000231', '0000000232', '0000000252', '0000000252', '0000000262'), so they are not extracted by the datasource /CRMBW/OLTP_SRV_REQUEST.

So our assumption is not correct but database_access tells the real reason.

Hope the break point at database_access make your life easy as well.

Summary:

Recently we had a client requirement on how to send an email created using CRM Mail forms containing client logo and other promotional images outside client’s network. 

For example: When we create a custom mail form with images(Client Logo) , Email is successfully transmitted including images when the recipient email id is within clients network, but email does not contain any images when the same mail is sent to a customer using other mail client like Gmail or Hotmail.

Requirement in Detail:

1) Mail forms are used to send tailored marketing information to target groups or to lists of marketing prospects. The system tailors the information based on the mail form, and           the current master data for the business partners in the specified target groups, or the data for the marketing prospects

2) Mail forms also provide the option to insert images for promotion or company logo’s.

3) When we insert any image using mail form, this image gets saved in content server of mime repository in SAP and due to security constraint this image will not be accessible      outside the network.

For E.g. we have inserted an Image in Mail form using “Insert Picture” (highlighted in yellow) option. When we select Design source option (Highlighted in green) we can see the image gets inserted using content server of Mime Repository.

4) This becomes a challenge because content is stored in SAP system and security team cannot allow the folders to be accessed outside of clients network.

Solution:

The simple solution which I could come up with is to edit the html source of mail forms and replace only the image path from Content server to an open server file path, by replacing the image path email client will be able to access the image content when the mail is sent outside the network of client.

Steps Involved:

1) Create a folder in client web server and upload all the images in that folder.

2) Test all the image path in your web browser to make sure that the image is visible.

3) Image Path will be somewhat like this.

     https://www.abcd.com /images/image1.png

4) Replace this image path with the path of content server.

5) For E.g. replace the highlighted path of Content server with the file path where image’s has been uploaded.

     HTML Syntax to insert an Image:

     <body>

     <form>

     <img src = “https://www.abcd.com/<folder name>/<FILE PATH NAME ON WEB SERVER>” alt=” “>

     </form>

     </body>

6) Save the mail form and trigger an Email using an id which is outside client’s network.

7) Validate if image is visible in SOST transaction.

8) Validate if image is visible in other mail client.

SAP CRM Update

Welcome to the Q2 2016 edition of the SAP CRM on-premise newsletter.  As we mentioned in previous newsletters, even though SAP is making amazing strides with our Cloud business, we also still have quite a few customers – across various industries – who prefer to keep their feet planted firmly on the ground and leverage their investments in our on-premise solution. In fact, SAP CRM on-premise just celebrated our 40^th consecutive fiscal quarter(that’s 10 straight years)of continued growth in total number of customers, installations, and end users!

And it’s not just customers who have taken notice. Analysts also recognize the strength of our on-premise SAP CRM solution. In their most recent Forrester Wave: Customer Service Solutions for Enterprise Organizations, Forrester positioned SAP CRM among the industry’s leaders, right on the line between “Leaders” and “Strong Performers”, ranking even slightly ahead of our very strong SAP Cloud for Service offering.

EHP4 Released for SAP CRM 7.0

Earlier this year, in January, SAP released both EHP3 SP11 as well as EHP4 (SP01) for SAP CRM 7.0– with EHP4 being our first new CRM enhancement package in quite some time. You can find the full details of what’s included in EHP4 here. And you can find the SP11 release notes here. Warning: navigating down to the documentation in the release notes on the Help Portal takes a bit of practice, as it requires a few clicks to drill down to the actual content. But don’t give up, keep clicking; it's totally worth it . Also, if you are an ASUG member, make sure to check out the recording of the webinar I presented, What’s New with SAP CRM 7.0 Enhancement Package 4.

It is important to note that EHP4 represents a significant change in SAP’s strategy around the concept of enhancement packages and delivering new functionality. In the past, when SAP would wait 18 months between new software releases, each new enhancement package would contain hundreds of new features and functions that the customer had to sift through. Now, as mentioned in previous versions of this newsletter, SAP has moved to a quarterly release-cycle and has adopted a new approach of releasing new features via notes and support packages as soon as each feature is available, instead of waiting 18 months to release all new features together.

So what does this mean for customers? As illustrated in the diagram below, EHP4 contains everything that SAP delivers in EHP3 SP11, plus some additional features like Debt Collection Management for Public Sector, Investigative Case Management enhancements, extensions to the Order-to-Cash scenario (such as Revenue Accounting integration, integration of scale prices with SAP Convergent Charging, etc.), various enhancements for the Utilities industry, and more.

EHP4 also contains the baseline code-foundation for a future concept we are working on that will, at some point in the future, hopefully allow SAP CRM to be deployed on top of SAP ECC in a co-deployment model. This deployment option will be targeted primarily at existing SAP ERP customers who have not yet deployed SAP CRM, but want to start taking advantage of some CRM capabilities to complement their ECC functionality.

Customers who are considering moving to EHP4 (versus staying on EHP3 for a while longer) will likely make their decision based on their required SAP NetWeaver version. EHP4 is built on the new NetWeaver 7.5 version which enables many new features and capabilities not available with NetWeaver 7.4 such as improved support for oData, Internet of Things (IoT), SAP Fiori (including offline mode), and much more. Here’s a good blog post with more info about NetWeaver 7.5. So for most customers, it probably makes sense to move to EHP4 as soon as their schedules permit.

**SAP CRM Updated Roadmap**

As mentioned in previous blog posts, you can always find the most current line of business roadmaps on the SAP Service Marketplace including the Service Roadmap, Sales Roamap, Marketing Roadmap, and more. These line of business roadmaps cut across SAP products and are not specific to CRM as they also contain content from ERP and other SAP solutions.

In addition to the line of business roadmaps above, you can now also find the latest SAP CRM Roadmap on the SAP Roadmaps Site.

SAP Customer Connection CRM2016 Program: 100 More New Features!

Customers often ask about the future roadmap for SAP CRM. Being a fairly mature product with a rich-set of functionality that has been developed over the years, SAP has primarily turned our roadmap for SAP CRM over to our customers. We’ve done this through an initiative called the SAP Customer Connection program, in which SAP CRM has participated in for the past 6 years.

The Customer Connection program typically opens each summer, allowing customers to start submitting their enhancement requests and voting on requests submitted by other customers. Then we close the submission period in the fall and begin evaluating submissions and conducting feasibility studies and effort estimates within our development organization. We announce the results in the winter and begin development on the selected topics with the goal of completing all developments by late summer the following year. As each new development is finished, it is usually made immediately available to customers via a note; where possible we also try to back-port the new enhancements to as many lower releases as possible.

In the CRM2014 round of the Customer Connection program SAP was able to deliver twenty-four (24) cool new CRM enhancements. In the CRM2015 round of the program we nearly doubled that with fifty-six (56) exciting new CRM enhancements! This year with CRM2016 we are hoping to again double our efforts and are planning deliver around one-hundred (100) or so more amazing CRM new enhancements later in the year, including things like:

• Type-ahead text determination/search (see SAP Note 2002900)
• Support for HTML5/SAPUI5 apps in CRM WebClient
• Drag and drop of attachments
• Multi-column sorting
• Spellcheck of Interaction Record comments
• RTF (Rich-Text Format) Editor support/improvement
• And many more…

Please see the SAP Improvement Finder for a list of new features that have already been released.

Not Your Grandfather’s User Interface: The *New* CRM WebClient UI

You’re probably already aware of the exciting stuff SAP has been doing with Fiori UX for CRM… such as offline support for select Fiori apps as well as the ability to run Fiori apps in the Cloud. And while we will continue to further enhance Fiori, including introducing a set of Service-related Fiori apps later in the year, we are also doing some amazing stuff with the CRM WebClient UI as well! So customers don’t necessarily need to move to Fiori to experience an enjoyable end-user experience.

For example, if you haven’t already seen it, a new “Fiori-style” skin called Blue Crystal is available for the CRM WebClient UI that provides a similar look and feel to the user experience available in Fiori, SAP Cloud for Customer and other next-generation SAP products. In addition, the CRM WebClient UI now supports things like “type-ahead search” so that you only need to type in the first few characters of your search query before the system shows you a list of matching results (see SAP Note 2002900 for details).

You can stay up to date on all the latest new WebClient UI features by following the CRM WebClient UI Enhancements page on SDN.

Several cool new UI Framework features were introduced with EHP4 SP01 back in January including:

• New “Fiori-style” Blue Crystal theme for the CRM WebClient
• Creation of direct URLs for saved searches
• Ability to filter recent items by object type
• Support for custom help documents

And you can even already take a look at what is being planned with EHP4 SP02 for May including:

• Integration with the SAP Theme Designer
• “Progress Indicator” THTMLB Tag to graphically display values
• “Floating Pager” for table controls
• Visual highlighting of mandatory fields

One of the WebClient UI enhancements that I am most looking forward to will hopefully be the ability to integrate HTML5/SAPUI5 widgets into any CRM WebClient screen – hopefully planned for sometime later this year!

Product Spotlight: Hybris Commerce Integration with SAP CRM

Hybris Commerce integration allows customers to leverage SAP CRM functionality with SAP Hybris Commerce. Sales orders created from the Hybris E-Commerce storefront can be automatically replicated to CRM/ERP, and pricing information can be retrieved from either backend system as well. Customers on the Hybris storefront can also can view their open SAP CRM service requests, service contracts, and invoices.

In addition, agents in the SAP CRM Interaction Center agents can launch the Hybris Assisted Service Module (ASM) via SAML single sign-on to assist customers making purchases on the Hybris storefront.

The “Hybris CRM Integration 1.0” package is available for download from SAP Service Marketplace. Hybris integration is currently only supported for Hybris 5.7 (6.0 and 6.1 support planned for later in 2016) and is compatible with SAP CRM 7.0 EHP1 SP15 and higher. For more info please see this Hybris Wiki page and SAP Note 2293490.

SAPPHIRE NOW & ASUG Annual Conference 2016: CRM Influence Council

Thank you to all of the customers who joined us in at SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference in Orlando last month for the CRM Influence Council. If you are not familiar with the ASUG CRM Influence Council, it is a select group of SAP CRM (on-premise) customers who meet (virtually) regularly throughout the year online in order to trade tips, tricks, and best practices as well as to help steer the direction of SAP’s CRM on-premise investments. Additionally, once a year the council meets in person at ASUG Annual Conference in order to hold a design-thinking brainstorming session about ways to improve SAP CRM.

Although membership in the Influence Council itself is invitation only, the design-thinking workshop at SAPPHIRE & ASUG was open to everyone! We had a great turnout with dozens of customers joining us for two sessions. We also received plenty of feedback from participants, both positive and constructive. The consensus was that customers love the new Fiori interface for SAP CRM and want to see even more Fiori apps, particularly for areas like Customer Service.

• More Fiori apps, especially for Customer Service, Field Service, Repair Depot, etc.
• Enhancements to Contract life cycle management
• Better support for large Sales Contracts and large Sales Orders with e.g,, over 1K line items
• More functionality for Claims and Returns in CRM (rather than ERP)
• More flexibility and control over configuration and personalization of the UI for end users
  
  

Closing Thoughts: What the heck is “Digital Transformation”?

As a forty-something aging hipster, I try my best to stay current with pop-culture trends and memes. I wear super-skinny jeans to the office. My Twitter hashtag game is still #OnFleek. And I’ve mastered both the “Dabb” and the “Whip/Nae Nae” dances. But keeping up with CRM trends is not quite as easy! For example, these days in CRM it’s apparently chic to be “digital” – whatever that means.

If you talk to a group of executives, almost all of them will nod their heads proudly and profess to be undergoing some kind of digital transformation initiative. But if you ask people what “digital transformation” means, suddenly everyone looks down in silence at their brogue oxfords (or flip flops, if you’re in Silicon Valley).

“Digital transformation” is the latest cool buzzword replacing older, formerly-cool buzzwords like: “Web 2.0,” “Enterprise 2.0,” “Social Business,” “Social Enterprise,” and “Digital Enterprise.” Essentially, the term “digital transformation” is often used to refer to any number of cool(ish), new(ish) technologies like: cloud computing, social media, mobility, smart connected devices, wearables, virtual reality, IoT (Internet of Things), etc.

However, if you ask me, the term “digital transformation” doesn’t make a lot of sense. Clock-radios from the 1980’s were digital, weren’t they? So were fax machines. And pagers. And that old BlackBerry in the bottom desk drawer, sitting by the even older Palm Pilot. So why is “digital” suddenly being used a proxy for new and cool?

And what exactly are companies transforming with digital technologies anyway? Does retooling your company’s website to optimally run on mobile devices constitute a “digital transformation”? If you hire an intern to create an Instagram page for your brand, have you suddenly joined the digital economy? Did you really transform your organization’s business processes; or did you just add another social media channel for your Marketing team to send out the same old spam?

There are however some examples of companies who have succeeded at true digital transformation. Netflix, for example, was famously able to disrupt (and bankrupt) traditional brick-and-mortal video rental retailers like Blockbuster with the new paradigm of digital-video streaming. In fact, last I heard, every Blockbuster store in the country with the exception of nine Blockbuster locations in Alaska had all been shuttered.

On the other hand, H&R Block was able to avoid a similar fate by transforming it’s business model in response to competition from online tax preparation products like Turbo Tax that allow people to prepare and file their taxes online without going into a branch office. So far at least H&R Block has been able to fend off the attacks from tools like Turbo Tax by launching its own online offering.

Google Nest is another perfect example of true digital transformation. Every-day household items such as garage door openers, front door locks, lights, water faucets, and thermostats had remained virtually unchanged for decades. But now they can all be controlled remotely from an app on your mobile phone.

One less obvious example, is athletic apparel upstart Under Armour who has been able to disrupt the business of traditional athletic apparel manufacturers like Nike and Adidas by building a huge online digital health and fitness community of over 80 million users (thanks to various acquisitions of online fitness communities like MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, and Edmondo).

And I’m sure that you can think of dozens or more examples, whether it is Yelp making printed telephone books obsolete, Waze replacing that old stand-alone GPS device on your car dashboard, Airbnb disrupting the hotel business, or Uber revolutionizing the antiquated taxi cab paradigm… or any of countless other examples.

So how does this affect you -- and SAP?  It's up to us together to monitor emerging next-generation digital technologies and to think about how these technologies will impact, and potentially disrupt, current best-business practices. SAP is already aggressively investing in Cloud technologies, Big Data Analytics, Mobile access, and Internet of Things. As one of the few companies with expertise across almost all industry verticals and the entire end-to-end supply chain, SAP is uniquely positioned to help you begin your digital transformation -- as rapidly, or as methodically, as you prefer .

In the meantime, my wife and I are still waiting for someone to make an app will enable our son to make his bed or put the toilet seat back down remotely from his smart phone. Now that would truly be transformative!

Sincerely,
John Burton on behalf of the SAP CRM product management and development team

Is this for me: This is about outbound emails. Read the pain points in the first bullet list and look at the results at the end to determine if you should spend time here

Introduction: Emails are a great way to connect with customers and provide them with pertinent information. SAP has many different ways of sending emails and choosing the best way for your client depends on many factors. Our client is in the midst of a digital transformation (aren’t we all...or am I late to the party?). The idea behind this post is to help those who may embark on a similar exercise in the near future. The approach I outline here uses IS-U & CRM (only Business master data replicated).

Background: The client is not happy with the state of affairs. The only way we(the client) reach out to our customers is through letter post. When was the last time you read one?.. We do emails but for a few isolated processes using a few standalone applications. This gives rise to the inevitable question: Can we use SAP for this: with undertones of 'but its so complex', 'will it be user friendly',  and 'we don't know what we will get'?. This was going to be the first major project for the client after the upgrade, plus it was part of the foundation to their digital transformation. We(the consultants) were committed to do our best and deliver something that hopefully exceeded expectations.

Since the requirements were somewhat open ended, the first step was to understand the clients needs and pain points. We already had some idea based on the existing situation and we conducted sessions to get the complete picture. Now this is a list of our client's pain points but it may read like its yours :

• Multiple small applications, no single source of truth
• No visibility into the content being sent, no metrics
• Manual data entry, unfriendly, generally clunky
• Need for something better (undefined)

The following requirements came from our clients:

• The current design needs to continue working: not all customers may have an email address or we may not have it
• Don't break things: Touching the existing correspondence (FI-CA) was a no-no as the regression testing itself would overwhelm available resources
• It just works: like Apple or magic or..

Apart from addressing these pain points, we had to brainstorm the better. Through our session (all my great ideas were stricken through, but I am sure some of you can use them ), we came up with the following definition of better:

• Scalability: The solution should be able to handle a lot of volume and spikes
• Extensibility: To extend outputs to other channels when needed (such as SMS) etc.
• Retention & Retrieval: Outbound communication need to be stored and viewed
• User friendliness: The customer should be able to handle most content changes themselves
• User friendliness: Random redirects to pictures of baby animals in the CIC, which will definitely reduce stress
• Standards Compliant: HTML is the standard.
• Exceptions: Stable therefore low exceptions and plugs into current exception handling
• Reporting and controls
• Replace the company logo in the CIC with a mini-game, preferably Pac-Man..what ? whyy ? Google does it too, you know

Design: Based on these considerations, we looked at various options available within SAP to send emails. We decided that an integration of Correspondence and mail Forms was the most appropriate choice for our use case. It seemed to deliver most of the major functionality via standard code.  Correspondence was a natural choice because of the no-regression clause but it had other things going in its favor as well.

• Correspondence
  • Built tohandle volume
    
  • Has the hooks in the right places  for triggers and other things(BTEs, FQEVENTS etc.)
  • Some logic resides in the application form (EFRM) and we did not want to duplicate it
  • Can leverage existing exception handling processes
  • Some reporting was already built in

• Mail forms
  • Again, built for high volume
  • Standards based: yay! now an agency or the client can work on the templates
  • User friendly: No weird interface to intimidate users. WSYIWYG

The high level design we converge on was to integrate the mail Forms with the correspondence framework via RFC. The correspondence framework supplies the triggers and the data and the Mail forms does the rendering and output. We also had to build a fair amount of custom stuff: retention, review, versioning etc. but more on that later.

Code: Here we only cover the major objects and on a high level (otherwise there simply is too much to cover).

• Mail Forms: The component is available in many standard roles (e.g. SALESPRO). We added it to our custom work center by adding the following link groups to our new work center. (Don't forget to activate them in the role if you doe the same)
  

• Attribute Context: An attribute context is a structure that we use to supply data to our mail form. While we created a new one, any suitable exiting structure should suffice as long as it has the fields we need. It needs to be added to customizing:

• Mail form: We created our mail form and assigned the attribute context to it . Its easy enough to change it later (in case its not defined).
  

          The WYSIWYG editor is nice but you can switch to the 'source' mode (blue button) and pasteHTML direclty (such as provided from an                agency). Text elements can be dynamic based on values in the attribute context and adding attributes (dynamic values) is something your client can                also do, once the right attribute context is defined.

              Many other blogs cover this in excruciating detail, I have found them to be a useful resource.

• Lets start composing our emails. Our data & triggers reside in ECC while the email composition is done in CRM. This is very obviously solved by an RFC. here is the import signature of our RFC and it returns an BAPIRET_2 erro message if one occurs:

IV_SENDER	TYPE	AD_SMTPADR	Sender email address
IV_PARTNER	TYPE	BU_PARTNER	Partner/Account
IV_MAILFORM_ID	TYPE	CRMT_PML_ID	Mail form ID
IT_RECEIVERS	TYPE	Table of type SRADDRESS	Receivers (To, CC, etc)
IT_INPUTFIELDS	TYPE	CRMT_ERMS_NAME_VALUES	Context Attributes values: Key value pair
IV_ACTIVE_VERSION	TYPE	XFELD	( Version : custom functionality)

          We need to string together two Function Modules within our RFC ' CRM_ERMS_MAIL_COMPOSE' & ' CRM_ERMS_MAIL_SEND'. Sample code:

• Transformation: The RFC needs a key value table from ECC. Since our print form also contains application logic, it would be best if we could somehow simulate the print and get the key values without actually invoking the print. This is achieved by the following code.  Set the parameter LS_PRINTPARAMS-GET_XSF to true to get the 'canonical XML representation' wrapped in the smartform  (<sf> </sf>) tags.

          The "smartform parameter" name above can be determined by looking at the interface of the output  smartform linked to the printform. So some valid                values  could be mail_sender, user_setting or v_date

• Custom Functionality: The rest of the functionality below is custom

• Extensibility & triggers: With composition take care of, we need to integrate the functionality i.e. call the RFC when the output is triggered. There are many hooks available and each is very specific but generally its a event (BTE or FQEVENT). We may call the RFC directly from our hook but with extensibilty in mind, we create an interface that is implemented by channel specific handler classes. The hook then reads the channel configuration and invokes the appropriate method to trigger the output. Currently, we only implement handlers for the email channel but adding another channel such as SMS is as easy as defining a new handler class and adding it to the configuration.

• Retention: We store the key value pairs generated in the transformation step in the DB within a cluster table (history table). The DB is updated with the trigger of the output in the previous step. We also created a versioning system for the mail forms. The key advantage to this approach is that we don't need to  store generated  emails. The stored key value pairs can merged on the fly with the active in time version to render the output sent to the customer. Each output aslo gets assigned a 6 character alpha numeric key to uniely identify the corresponding instate to the customer/CSR and is rendered inconspicuously. This plays an important part in the next step.

• Retrieval: The client and its CSRs now have an insight into what was sent to the customer. A custom view was made available to the CSRs based on the history table. The view has one click actions to view the HTML and reissue the email. To do this we pass the stored key value pairs to CRM via an RFC which calls the previousl used 'CRM_ERMS_MAIL_COMPOSE' FM to render the HTML. This HTML( parameter iv_body ) is now cached in the SAP server with a unique URL and is rendered within an iframe. The 6 character alpha numeric key is used to construct a unique url for the email.

Result: We were able to hit all our checkboxes. We are self reporting that we got a lot of postive feedback from out client (and some cake too) . The solution is working without any reported issues (which always makes me wonder if its being used at all, but we even got responses from our customer at our no-reply box so it must be).

Here are some pixelated pictures( email & cic view):

Alternatives: What are some possible alternatives for those without CRM? Is roll your own a good option? Using the SAP BTF editor and something like WWW_HTML_MERGER. Not that I would recommend it ever

Next Steps: Our client want some emails to be manual with in-place editing. This will be challenging as (far as I know) SAP doesn't have such functionality. A couple of possibilities are to use a view with dynamically generated XML or IFRAME where the HTML is rendered with input fields instead of content. I am not relishing the thought of either of those options. has someone done something similar? Is there a better way?

Hi All,

Recently I encountered an issue that field ACTUAL_TS_TO was blank in full load while it was filled in delta load. To check this issue, I tried to simulate the extraction by transaction code RSA3. And as I expected, this issue was reproduced. Then I debugged this issue.

I set two breakpoints at function module SMOX3_GET_DATA and mapping function module. Something strange happened! After setting gs_single_process_only to 'X' in function module smox3_get_data, the affected field was filled. Why this happened?

I discussed this behavior with our colleagues and finally got the reason. When the parallel processing is enabled, the extraction collects the data in transfer structure format and then it is moved to the extract structure.

In case of single processing (gs_single_process_only = 'X’), the extraction data are collected to extract structure format.

So for the issue I encountered, there should be something wrong with the transfer structure.

Since the transfer structure did not contain the field ACTUAL_TS_TO hence it was empty when moving the data to extract structure (function SMOX3_CALL_SELECT_PP ). Finally we completed the transfer structure by the following and the field gets value.

set the SELECTION field of the ROOSFIELD table to 'X' where OLTPSOURCE=0CRM_SALES_ACT_1 and OBJVERS=A and FIELD=ACTUAL_TS_TO.

Then replicate the metadata and activate the datasource in BW system.

So if we encounter an issue that some of the fields are blank after parallel processing is activated, we could have a look at the transfer structure.

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