SAP fieldglass

SAP bought this company in 03/2014 and solution for Workforce & Vendor Management Software (VMS) appeared in its portfolio. Vendors or let’s say extended workforces or contingent workers either temporary staff, contractors of all kinds and services delivered via statements of work can be managed by SAP fieldglass. As market of software for contingent workforce is raising this field together with growth of cloud computing became interesting for SAP. Solution is cloud based only and it offers whole bunch of processes to support these kinds of vendor’s data. Processes covers include procurement, statements of work, project management, and payment.

From integration to other SAP’s products point of view the plans are there to integrate the fieldglass with SAP's SuccessFactors HCM software and SAP’s Ariba Network. On top of that integration is planed with ECC’s HCM application. Needless to say that with advert of SAP HANA there will be a kind of HANA powered version of the fieldglass delivered soon or later.

Useful links:

www.fieldglass.com

HanaHaus – café and community workspace

SAP recently (on March 19th 2015) opened a kind of coffee shop in hearth of Silicon Valley - in Palo Alto. This is just first place of this kind where SAP shows their approach to contribute to public perception of what becoming their flag ship product – HANA. By having it in Palo Alto; SAP wants to show its commitment to innovation and start up spirit which both have great legacy in this location.

What it serves for is following. There are workspaces for rent for individuals or small groups. Place for workshops, small conferences and all kinds of events like hackathons and even movie viewing or standup comedy performance. And more basic purpose is of course to just have a cup of great coffee!

Just one more thing: They serve a Blue Bottle Coffee in hanahaus J

Links:

hanahaus.com

twitter.com/hanahaus

Native SQL issue: CONNECT statement returns 4

Recently I faced following issue related to Native SQL statement. While attempt to connect external DB via Native SQL’s statement CONNECT TO I got return code 4. This happened only in one of systems in the landscape same ABAP code on other systems connected to the same external DB worked just fine.

After consulting this issue with Basis team we found out root cause. Issue was that TNS Names entry was missing. After adding the connection worked fine.

From SAP GUI you can check the enry via tcode: DBCO or DBACOCKPIT

From ORACLE DB point of view; the TNS names entry are physically stored tnsnames.ora file. Usually the file is located under path:

ORACLE_HOME\NETWORK\ADMIN directory of your database server.

Or in SAP instance:

/usr/sap/SID/SYS/profile/oracle/

Manipulating line end marker for files in ABAP

None SAP system is standalone and needs to communicate with other systems therefore interfaces are very important ABAP deliverables. One of interface techniques is just transfer of the data via files or sometimes called flat files. While they are transferred sometimes even over different OS; there are requirements for different end line markers.

Here it is very important to have a possibility to influence what will be a end line marker set in particular file. This is possible within ABAP command called OPEN DATASET. Within its addition called WITH XXX LINEFEED this can be achieved. In case the statement for WINDOWS OS it looks like:

OPEN DATASET lv_filename FOR OUTPUT 

IN TEXT MODE 

ENCODING DEFAULT 

WITH WINDOWS LINEFEED.

Possible values of line feed:

XXX	End line marker
Unix	LF
WIN	CRLF
NATIVE	line end marker is interpreted in accordance with the current code page
SMART	line end marker depends on access type (INPUT/OUTPUT/APPENDING/UPDATE)

BW upgrade: not possible to display generated program for Transformation

After physical import of support packages into the BW system in case of SAP BW upgrades there may all kinds of errors occur. One of very common ones are related to the transformations. During the upgrade the transformations are reset which means generated programs behind them need to be regenerated. This can be done via ABAP report called RSDG_TRFN_ACTIVATE. This report can be used to reactivation of transformations which means the GP* will be reactivated or to just check what transformations are inactive.

There is a functionality within the UI of transformation (weather it is TA RSA1 or RSTRANGUI) which allows to see the GP* which is behind the particular transformation. It is accessible via menu Extras -> Display Generated Program.

While accessing this function for transformation which is broken we can run into the following error:

Unable to find a tool to process the request

Message No. SEU_MANAGER026

To solve this first it is necessary to have a look at what stage the transformation is. If there are errors (e.g. Transformation XYZ contains invalid rules Message No. RSTRAN344) with the transformation indicated by Check function then most likely the TRFN has no GP* generated and it even can’t be generated because there is no entry in table TRDIR for the transformation. In this case solve the issue within source and target objects of the transformation. Afterwards see the transformation itself.

In case all objects around the transformation look okay see if there are any SAP Notes applicable. This is especially valid for lower releases of BW than 7.0.