Preliminary note: this project was developed on SAP Netweaver 7.02 SP11 with GW 2.0 SP04 Developer edition available here... so actually there's no need for a CRM system to be able to play with it (despite the title of this blog), as soon as component WEBCUIF is present in your system.
Last year I wrote a blog post about a project that I created on code exchange: BMDG -- Bol Master Data Generator. It's a tool that allows me to create any kind of bol object. All I have to do is fill-in a customizing view with the expected rules: for example, if I need to create a business partner whose first name and last name are constant values together with address fields determined at runtime via importing parameters, I can do so by creating the corresponding "template", and then call BMDG with the template ID.
For more information kindly check the following links:
CRM7.01: what if you could create complex master data models in one click?
CRM7.01: secret weapon for data model creation
However, until now I was only providing the "engine". In other words, if you ever wanted to use BMDG you had to develop your own program and copy/paste the lines of code at the end of my previous blog post to make it work. And even if it represents only 7 lines of code, it was fair enough not to consider BMDG "plug-and-play".
Then last week a friend of mine asked me if I knew a tool to copy/paste marketing plans from Excel inside SAP CRM... I got no clue, but this rang a bell about BMDG: this tool is fully generic so any kind of bol object can be created with it. Also, as of SAP Netweaver 7.01 or 7.02, you can now copy/paste your data from Excel inside any WebUI table. Why not combine both worlds to be able to generate any data model out of a simple table view where users could paste values coming from flat files or Excel?
Sounded like something interesting to me. So I created a WebUI component, that is now shipped with BDMG (together with sample templates based on SFLIGHT model), to unveil the potential of this tool and finally make it "plug-and-play" compliant. Here is how it works:
1) Start WebUI component ZBMDG_UI:
2) Then select a template from the dropdown list:
Only those templates that contain values to be determined at runtime from an importing structure are displayed -- which means that if you created templates where all bol objects' attributes are filled-in with constant values for example, they won't be displayed in the list. As soon as a template is selected, the table is re-arranged automatically, so that you can now enter the values you need, or copy/paste them from Excel:
3) Click the "Import" button:
BMDG will run through each and every line of the table, to create the objects as per the corresponding template (of course there can be more than one object created per line depending on how the template has been customized). Once done, the result status is displayed in the first column, and you can click on the icon to display the complete log:
Here is a short video to show BMDG WebUI component in action:
If you're interested, feel free to join the project on code exchange, make comments, discuss about new features that could be implemented, and of course download everything free of charge:
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