Change Pointers : Re-execution of Master Data Delta Changes

[Former Member]

In this Document, I will display the use of Change Pointers in HR and will also show limitation of the same and an effective way to overcome that limitation.

Change Pointers:

We can use change pointer to send Delta data, by Delta I mean just the changes, lets take an example of employee data, employees salary is increased in the current month than in delta loads only the changed information will be sent to the receiving system. SAP has provided standard program to run the delta loads for which we do have pre-requistes of change pointer settings which contains 3-4 steps.

In this document we are assuming that change pointers setting in SAP had been done for a message type say HRMD_A.

SAP Solution for Delta Loads

SAP has provided a program which can be executed through transaction code BD21, Program - RBDMIDOC. Screenshot of the program is attached below

Message type field contains name of the message for which change pointer configuration is completed.

Execution of this program, generated IDOCs for message type provided in the field and all the change data since last run of this program is pulled in the IDOC data.

Once Idoc is generated changes are marked so whenever this program re executed same data will not be transmitted.

Limitation of Delta Load - BD21

Major drawback of delta load is that, we cannot re-run the data load,assume the reaons like transmission link failed etc, we cannot send same data becuase once data is sent out from SAP, it is marked and is not considered in re run.

Although we can reprocess the IDOC but it can be a tedious process and human error is also possible.

Suggested Solution to re run Delta Run

BD21 when re executed, skips marked data but we have one more program which sends the data even if it has been already sent.

Program Name - RHALESMD

This program send HR master data changes irrespective of change pointer flag status, it picks data from the date and time provided at the selection screen till system date. This is very useful when we want to re run or re send the idocs. For e.g. if we want to send data from last month till date, we can use this program and program will pick all the changes till last month.