Well, it’s funny, just yesterday we were talking about interface design and the printouts, and here we are already finding an issue 🙂 Well, I came up with a great idea of having multiple Sales Printouts, and using the function: VC_I_GET_CONFIGURATION to just call it by Sales Printout and by the name of the UI Char group. Well, unfortunately, I found that char group is not one of the parameters you can send into VC_I_GET_CONFIGURATION. This was highly disappointing to me. I did a little debug work, and found that it’s even more confusing than that. If you create multiple Interface Designs with the same printout checked (for example, Sales Printout is selected on 2 different char groups) then it will only display the characteristics common in both groups. Confusing??? well it was to me too. So, let me explain a little better…
Char group 1 (sales printout has been checked)
Cstic 1
Cstic 2Cstic 3
Char group 2 (sales printout has been checked)
Cstic 2
Cstic 4
Cstic 6
If you execute: VC_I_GET_CONFIGURATION for sales, then it will only return Cstic 2.
I really don’t understand this behavior, but it’s what the function does.
Now… there is one potential, so bear with me…
Option 2 is a bit more involved, and depending on the requirements may not even be an option. Here is the basic concept. We would create a “super” UI for “engineering” that would be used for production orders and the like. Then each characteristic (within the model specific class) could have an organizational area set. We could create an organization for each plant (or each breakdown needed). We could then assign all the applicable org areas to each characteristic, and the function module above is able to take into account the org areas in what it prints. Since this is confusing, here’s an example…
Org areas available:
1-Plant 1
2-Plant 2
3-Plant 3
4-Plant 4
5-Plant 5
Etc…
Plant 1 only wants to see: Char 1, char 2, char 3.
Plant 3 wants to see char 1, char 3, char 5, char 7
Plant 5 wants to see char 1, char 4, char 7, char 10.
The Class would have the following:
Char Org Area
CHAR 1 1, 4 , 5
CHAR 2 1
CHAR 3 1, 4
CHAR 4 5
CHAR 5 4
CHAR 6
CHAR 7 4, 5
CHAR 8
CHAR 9
CHAR 10 5
So our UI (interface design) for engineering would contain:
CHAR 1
CHAR 2
CHAR 3
CHAR 4
CHAR 5
CHAR 7
CHAR 10
Now, when plant 1 prints the production order, we would call the function above with Org Area = 1, Engineering = X
The function will then pull the “super” UI, and then strip out anything that doesn’t have Org Area = 1.
Now keep in mind, VC_I_GET_CONFIGURATION can read the org areas, but I haven’t fully proved out this idea. If anyone has a better idea to do something like this, I’d love to hear it.
So, there’s your forray into the mind of a crazy VC modeler. Thanks for reading.
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike