Transport Management with Transports of Copies

[Former Member]

Introduction

There are several types of transport requests in the SAP system, two of which you are most familiar with.

Customizing Requests are generally for system customizing activities that you’d do in SPRO.

Workbench Requests are generally for things you would create in the ABAP workbench. This is primarily code or custom objects.

Most to all of your normal development and customizing work is done in these two transport types. When you use these transport types, the system assumes you are going to move the contents of your transport to the QA system, and then to the Production system. While in a perfect world this is true, not all transports will be going to production due to testing, bug fixes, and scope changes.

For this reason, we want to use a different transport type called Transport of copies.  A transport of copies will move the latest version of an object included to the system of your choice, but will not assume that you want to move it to production. Therefore, it transports a “copy” of the object but assumes that its final destination is only the system that you are moving it to. A normal transport on the other hand would assume it’s going to the system that you’re moving it to (QA) and all other systems downstream from it. (Production)

Also for this reason, we can move all the transports of copies we want and we won’t see them affect the downstream system. (Production) They will only affect the system that we move them into. You will still be opening a single Customizing or Workbench request to move your changes to production, but you will only be releasing these requests when you know you are ready to move. For unit testing in QA you will be moving Transport of Copies until you are satisfied with what you have. At this time, you will release your original change request and move it into QA for final User Acceptance testing. By doing this, you will be using a single transport for your change that will ultimately go to production.

Transport of Copies Procedure

There are several ways to create a TOC but we’ll cover how
to do it in SE01.

	Above:	Request -> Create

	Above:	Select “Transport of Copies”

	Above:	For the description it’s helpful to prefix the standard naming  convention with TOC so that you’ll know it’s a TOC by looking at the title.  You’ll also need to specify in the Target box which system it’s going to  which will be the QA system in you landscape. Go ahead and save your transport.

	Above:	At this point you’ll have an empty TOC. It should look like above.

	Above:	Now you’ll need to add content to the transport. Go to Request/Task -> Object List ->  Include Objects….

	Above:	You will now see an Object Inclusion box like above.

If you know the task number, you can enter it here and press ok. If you don’t then press the selection button to view transports assigned toyour username.

IMPORTANT!-You will need to use the task number of the change you want to move. Ifyou select the entire transport it’ll only move a list of the tasks in thetransport and not the task itself.

	Above:	Use the screen above to lookup the transport that you’d like to make  a copy of.

TIP: Be sure to select“All request types” if you are unable to find your transport.

	Above:	From the pop up, I’m able to see my transport and all tasks within  it. I want to move a copy of a role that I’m working on and I can see that  the task below (SMGK90035) contains my role. Select the task that you would like to copy and click ok.

Quick TIP! - You can keep trackof your TOC’s within the “Documentation” tab within the transport that you madethe copy from.

	Above:	After clicking ok, I can now see that the objects of my original task  have now been copied to my Transport of Copies. I can now release this TOC  and move it to QA and I will see my edited role.

As always - Comments/Concerns/Questions are welcomed.