In ECC there are numerous places to view IDOCs, with a variety of t-codes to do various processing tasks. Traditional approaches to error handling in IDOC management use transactions such as WE02, WE05, WE09, WE19, BD87 and the WEDI menu.
S/4HANA still has these traditional ECC locations and WEDI is available in Fiori, however, SAP S/4HANA also offers an improved version of all these with transaction WLF_IDOC (Fiori app “IDOC processing”):
This app acts as a cockpit for all the former ECC6.0 transactions mentioned above. Tons of selection varieties are available here on the various tabs on the selection screen. The “Criteria for data record” can even be used to search within segments for specific data (as is possible in the traditional WE09 approach).
From this cockpit, you can navigate directly to the IDOCs and execute all your necessary functions.
For Example:
1. Display IDOC
2. Edit IDOC
3. Process: This allows you to process the IDOC in the event of the IDOC being as yet unprocessed, or in error state. The options displayed when hitting the “process” button are Online (process the IDOC in the foreground), dialog BD87 (process the IDOC using the traditional BD87 route) or background (process the IDOC in the background).
4. Filter and Sort – Often forgotten about but powerful tools of sorting, filtering, and categorizing are available.
5. Change View
6. Send IDOC via RFC
7. Compare IDOC – This is a really useful tool to compare two IDOCs which may look the same but one has failed. In the event that the status message you receive from SAP against the failed IDOC is not necessarily enough to identify the error, you can list out the differences between a successful IDOC and the unsuccessful one and go through each segment to see where you have an issue.
8. Change Control Record
9. Copy IDOC and Delete Segment – you can create your own copy of an existing IDOC with a specific segment deleted. This is similar in function to the traditional WE19 option to create a copy version of the IDOC:
10. Change the status of an IDOC – Often, if an IDOC error is manually corrected in the document, the IDOC status should be changed to reflect that. In the past, this had to be done by running a program such as RC1_IDOC_SET_STATUS. Now SAP allows you to amend the status in the IDOC here.
Finally, another great S/4 monitoring tip is to set up a custom Fiori tile with a function module in the background which runs a variant of WLF_IDOC to show all IDOCs in “error” status. The dynamic Fiori tile should look something like the following which will allow your team to monitor IDOCs in real time from their Fiori homepage:
Good news if you’re still running ECC but have Fiori, this functionality is also available If you already EHP5 SP10+ or EHP6 SP07+. Allowing you to leverage advanced SAP EDI monitoring with embedded Fiori dashboards all from the comforts of ECC. Pretty powerful stuff in the world of EDI monitoring.
If you have questions regarding this topic or would like to learn more, please reach out to me, Michael Johnson, via email at michaelj@americandigital.com.
Also- the other blogs I provided for Aruba, they each need the following closing statement when you add them to our blog section.
If you have questions regarding this topic or would like to learn more, please reach out to me, Rodrigo Lau, via email at rodrigol@americandigital.com.