The Global Search feature in SAP Sourcing allows you to find a document by searching on its attributes. For example, you can find a contract document using supplier, contact name, and item number.
Review: Security, Configuration settings added in 9 SP 22 / 10 SP 6
You can use security settings to control which users are able to use Global Search. Starting in these SP's, the System group has a Global Search permission setting. As delivered, all users have access to Global Search.
If you only need global search capability for certain documents, you can limit Global Search by classid using the system property userinterface$globalSearch.classids.
For further information about these features, see the Configuration Guide for your release level at http://help.sap.com/sourcing.
New: Reduce Global Search footprint with SAP Sourcing 9 SP 23 / 10 SP 8
The Global Search capability requires an index of document data. To maintain this, each time you create or update a global-search-enabled document, an entry is created in the XML Extract Queue table. The index is updated by the scheduled task "Search XML Extract," which processes the extract queue and updates the index with the new/changed data.
As originally implemented, the XML file includes almost all of the persisted data for a document. In SAP Sourcing versions earlier than 9 SP 23 or 10 SP 8, the XML for Global Search was causing database administrators to add more and more disk space to support the sourcing application. In these recent releases, significant changes were made to the preparation of the XML file to reduce the amount of data included, without negatively affecting the usefulness of the feature.
- Several field types were removed from the XML output file, including BOOLEAN, INTEGER, DECIMAL, and FLOAT.
- Optimizations were made to remove data when the data was for internal use or had little value for search. Examples of these are the line item formula results, which store a calculated value for a mathematical expression, and Supplier Entered Attributes on line items, when the supplier did not enter a value.
These optimizations are expected to reduce the XML size by 50% or more; to reduce the SQL activity during extract processing by 50% or more; and to shorten the Index Refresh processing time by 70% or more.
Some of this improvement happens automatically as part of the upgrade. The XML for three document types, however, is potentially very large:
- Master Agreements
- Agreements
- RFx Responses
Therefore, to minimize the risk of disruption to daily operations, the re-creation of the index data specifically for these three document types is reserved as a process requiring some manual steps.
To gain the full benefit of the optimization, see SAP Note 2251373 for further description of the global search improvements and for details on planning and executing the related manual post-upgrade steps.
