Skip Process Chain’s process – some details

I mentioned possibility of skipping Process Chain’s (PC) process or step in my older posts related to PCs - Automatic restart of failed PChain step and other PC improvements. While using it I found it very useful as it is possible to prevent failure of the PC. 

It happened to me recently that within one PC I skip the process. The PC was successfully finished because the broken process wasn’t executed. However after some time I have set the process to be skipped it I saw that that my PC is failing. I went to the PC itself and I realized that the particular process is not set to skip. Someone simply went to the PC and “un-skip” it. I was curious to learn when and who did it.

I found a table that stores the processes that re to be skipped. It is table RSPCCHAIN_SKIP – “Skipped processes”. But it was my unpleasant surprise that information on who and when the particular process was set to skip is not there. Only information present there are like Process Type, Process Variant (Name), Sequence number, Skip Process. I found it strange to be honest. I tried to debug the particular functionality hoping there are some other tables logging on information I was looking for. I found methods _SET_SKIPPED of class CL_RSPC_FRONTEND. Here really only fields mentioned above are populated. Furthermore another method SET_SKIPPED of class CL_RSPC_CHAIN is called that updates the RSPCCHAIN_SKIP table.

Conclusion is that at the moment (speaking of BW version 74 SP 09) there is no possibility to find out who and when set/unset Skip of process with the PC.

I followed up and wanted to post this missing functionally to SAP idea place as suggestion for future product improvements. I learned that old ideas.sap.com site is now obsolete and content was moved to Customer Influence site. As per https://ideas.sap.com/ct/s.bix?c=132CDA79-5610-40B5-BFC6-E7F5DC4CFB1D the Data Warehousing in General (CLOSED) suggestion page the SAP BW is “a stable and mature state now.” .. “we have come to the conclusion that there is no longer a need to keep this communication channel constantly open.” In other words do not dare to suggest any improvements to SAP BW – it is stable and matured enough :)