The little things that mean a lot

[keohanster]

The SAP Customer Connection for Workflow 2015 held a call on Thursday August 27.  Regrettably, I was not able to attend (because I was moderating an ASUG webcast on MyInbox!!! Recordings can be found on the ASUG site, you must be a member to access the ASUG recordings).

But I've been following the activity for this Customer Connection.  For starters, read Rick Bakker's blog announcing some of the improvements - http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-65685 or ronen.weisz  blog SAP Workflow 2015 Customer connection Selection Call.

I am fortunate to be able to develop and test workflow applications in both ECC and SRM.  And having cut my teeth in ECC, I became accustomed to executing workitems as the workflow administrator. That's easy in the SAPGui, you get to see what the end user would see, and then you can debug away.

But in SRM, if you grab a workitem and want to process it from the UWL front-end (or if you really want to feel my pain, from the ITS inbox in the olden days), you couldn’t. 

You’d get a message "You cannot choose yourself as an agent" (with a green check mark, no less). This is not helpful to debugging workitems from the front end.  You could, of course, begin to execute the item, allow it to create a short dump because UWL and old ITS transactions cannot be executed in the SAPGUI… but the end result is that the workitem does end up in your inbox.

But I hate creating short dumps.

In the course of upgrading to SRM7, I may have created dozens, well OK, hundreds perhaps, or short dumps, but I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get a workitem delivered to my UWL inbox, so that I can debug it.

Enter the SAP Customer Connection, and request number D8542…

So if you’ve felt that particular pain, go look at OSS Note 2188631.  There you will see the solution to this issue.  Yep, there are some coding changes that are released by SAP to allow you, the poor workflow developer/admin to forward workitems to yourself.

All hail the SAP Customer Connection program for listening to real life problems (albeit a sort of small one) and delivering a solution for us.

There are many more requests that are either already delivered (say WHAT Sue?  YES, already delivered via OSS note) and there are more requests that WILL be delivered.

I strongly encourage you to visit the SAP Customer Connection on Influence.SAP.com to listen to the recording of the 8/27 call, download the presentation, and explore which of the requested items will (or already are!!!) resolved.

And in closing…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C7SzKv2uLU

and thanks to daniel.alexander, alan.rickayzen, and ralf.goetzinger on the SAP side, for listening to the customers.  You guys rock.