Question:
In our BPS, we do all our planning on 0FISCPER (XXX.YYYY), but we have a requirement to populate as well 0FISCPER3 (XXX) and 0FISCYEAR (YYYY).
The most straight forward solution I can think of is creating a characteristic relationship of type exit involving those three, but since this is such a common requirement, maybe SAP thought of something fancy to deal with it.
Has anybody solved this problem in a more creative way? Is there a standard way of achieving it, with no ABAP involved?
Thank you for your help,
G
Answer:
Hi Guille,
As far as I know NO. We are doing characteristic relationship too. One of the things we feedback to SAP is that it would be nice if Fox has string manipulation i.e. concatenate, substring, left, right, etc. With that it would be easier to derive related characteristics.
At my current client, we have the added complexity of custom time characteristics for fiscal month and Fiscal quarter for a 4-4-5 calendar modelled as normal characteristics since we cannot create custom time characterstic in BW. Believe me, we had to do significant IF statements in FOX to handle some of the looping and corresponding week/period, month, etc. of last year...
This should be a development request!!! Hopefully if enough people ask for it, SAP would do something.
Mary
Answer:
p.s. you should post the question in our yahoo group since several people in SAP are sleeper / silent observers in the group.
Answer:
But in the Yahoo group, all are not admitted unfortunately. The opportunities for sharing the project experience and knowledge are restricted that way.
There are many new comers to SEM. These guys face a lot of issues during project implementation and they seek answers. SAPFANS forum continue to be one such place of sharing experience and knowledge. It is certain all these new comers (whoever has a passion for SEM) will do well over a period of time, if not immediately.
The Yahoo group seems to be dominated by few and by not allowing the new comers to join, it is a pity that they also restrict their learning.
Guille: Please continue to post your queries and answers here. We are all your fans
Rgds
Answer:
I am not saying that Guille should only post in the SAPSEm yahoo group and not here in SAPFANs. SAPFANS is a good forum/resource and there are several members that are active on both.
What I am saying is that if Guille feels that the functionality should be a regular feature of BPS and would like the "suggest" it to SAP as future development, it can be done through OSS, through users group such as ASUG or he could post the comment also on the yahoo group. There are representatives of SAP on the group including several Platinum consultants and people in BPS product marketing..
The group is set up as an advanced group, thus requiring people have at least reasonable foundation / experience in SEM.
Rgds, Mary
Answer:
p.s. I think at ASUG Fall Forum in Dallas, we asked about the possibilty of substring and concatenation in FOX in future releases. They seemed interested in the idea/suggestion but no promises. If we had string manipulation in formulas, we can derive and synchronize Fiscal Year, Fiscal Period and Fiscal Year/Period easily I think.
Mary
Answer:
Guille,
We had the same need as you in our project and obviously, we didn't any other way to derive period and fiscal year except with ABAP.
We find the exact example in the F1 doc. in BPS0 of the exit to develop (which is finally short and easy to insert).
Moreover, we had many needs in our projets that we realized with ABAP and FOX. I think in our experience that ABAP development is more effective and performance (for a lot of treated lines in BPS) than Fox development. So, I wonder really what way to follow in the future : Fox or Abap Exit.
I don't know if you experienced same things in your projects.
Anthony
Answer:
Hi Tony,
We had also found that Fox is good for simple calcs and/or simple loops but ABAP is much more efficient if there are extremely complicated calcs with multiple / nested looping, especially if there are a lot of rows in the level.
Also have to be careful with memory issues since some of our FOX if we left the variables too widely open by mistake, they dump after a long time whereas the same function run in 1 minute or less when restricted....
Guille, what is your experience?
Also for those interested, there is an advanced BPS workshop in Walldorf, I think it is 3 days and is scheduled for beginning of Feb and again in May.
Mary
Answer:
Hello all,
We had the same issue where in some levels we used 0FISCPER (MMM.YYYY) and on others 0FISCYEAR (YYYY) and 0FISCPER3 (MMM) separately.
We found three SAP standard user exits that must be set in the Characteristic Reltationships in every planning area where these time chars are involved. The three user-exits are:
UPB_TIME_EXIT_FISC_DERIVE
UPB_TIME_EXIT_FISC_CREATE
UPB_TIME_EXIT_FISC_CHECK
We have set-up two Char Relationships in each basic planning area:
1. Derive 0FISCPER from 0FISCYEAR and 0FISCPER3
2. Derive 0FISCYEAR and 0FISCPER3 from 0FISCPER.
It works perfectly and now we can use either of the time chars and the other(s) will be set automatically through this derivation.
Good luck
Regards,
Rodolfo Bermudez
Answer:
We have tried the function modules and just put them in a overall exit that takes place whenever data is written. It works just fine and is very simple to use.
In SEM 3.5 FOX should have some new functionality to manipulate characteristic values - so we must wait a little while.
have a nice day