SSC

Well, I wanted to pass on my most recent and valuable discovery about the SSC Eclipse Editor.  That is prototyping a new model is so much easier in this editor.  Now, the VC purest in me still knows that at the end of the day, the VC rules must still be adhered to, and best practices in modeling don’t change.  But here’s the value of the SSC Eclipse Editor.

If you model like I do, you work best by just jumping in and starting to put things together.  Well, this is great up to the point of enter in master/transactional data.  If you know SAP, you know that deleting things, renaming things, or going in a whole new direction is a royal PITA once you create a sales orders or production orders, etc.  because at that point, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to do some renaming…

The SSC Eclipse Editor is not locked into the same issues.  Because it’s text based, you put everything together, do your initial testing, and if you don’t like the way something is working… or more commonly, you find out new information half way through your model, you can quickly adapt, change names, restructure tables etc.  With very little pain.

Now don’t get me wrong, you’ll still have these pains because at some point you need to connect the SSC Model to either ECC or CRM, once that happens, you’ll be back to the same pain, but when you prototype the model, it sure is nice (for me) to have that flexibility to change my design on the fly without a lot of headaches (in fact, something a simple find and replace everywhere gets me where I need to be).  This is certainly not possible in the standard ECC Variant Configuration…  Food for thought…

Thanks for reading,

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the SSC and trying to create my first major model.  Needless to say, I keep learning new tricks, so I don’t want to lose them.  Today I want to talk about using the find_or_create statement to perform automatic instantiation for a material or a class.

find_or_create ((300) CLASS_NAME,
with
CHAR1 = 1;
CHAR_PARENT = ?S;
CHAR2 = ’48’ )
or

find_or_create ((material)(300)(nr=material_number) )

You can see that there are 2 distinct approaches.  The first is instantiating a class, the second a material.  Let’s start with the class, just like in any constraint based syntax, the find_or_create statement requires a class type (normally, 300), followed by the class name.  Now, to keep things fun, you can add the with statement, and it will pass values automatically to the instance.  Often, you will use an ADT (abstract data type) to signify who the parent is (notice CHAR_PARENT) listed above.  You can pass as many or as few values as needed.

The second version is the easiest…  combining the (material) and (nr=material_number), and bingo… you’ve instantiated a material (with no classification).

Now, if you’re familiar with the advanced mode modeling, the find_or_create statement appears to replace the has_part statement (at least I couldn’t make that syntax work in the SCC editor).

Now, here’s a tip with some power.