Development package for locked BW objects

In SAP BW version 74 SAP did a lot of work with respect to enhancing number of characters that particular object can have in its technical name. Also a much was done to enlarging object’s (characteristics) value from previously max 60 characters to 250/1333 characters (for more informacion see here). In brief what happened is that data element RSCHAVL which in pre 74 versions referred to domain RSCHAVL which had 60 chars (Data Type CHAR 60) in length is now referring to same domain but it has now (in 74) 1333 chars (Data Type SSTRING) in length.

There are of course many customers who developed their own custom functions based on old shorter version of domain/data element. Typical example is user exit based variables. Here customers are developing their own code to populate variable values. Since in pre 74 versions of BW the values could have only 60 chars in length and now it can have 1333 chars there might an issues pop-up running specific ABAP code. The code would expect 60 chars as maximum which is not the case in 74. SAP wants to support such customers and for compatibility reasons the “old style” of domain/data element are still available in 74 version. The old objects name is RSCHAVL60 for both domain and data element. What you need to do as part of BW74 upgrade you need to align such a code.

However this change has also an influence on where the domain/data element is assigned from software logistics perspective. It actually caused that data element object (RSCHAVL) was moved to other development package. The Dev pack where the data element belongs to is called RS_DTEL_LOCKED and that one belongs to superpackage BW_FOUNDATION.

As per this change it seems that the pack RS_DTEL_LOCKED is supposed to store objects that are not supposed to be changed anymore. Even it suggests its description as it can be observed in 74 based systems: “BI: Locked Data Elements”. All the objects in this package are then parked and their definition is not supposed to be changed.