preventing changes once WF underway

Tue Jul 3 05:12:23 EDT 2001

hi john

there's another way to prevent an object from being changed but its a b=
it
'brute force':

1. check whether you either have an user exit at the beginning of the
transaction or you can use a field exit at a field on the FIRST screen =
that
appears when entering the application.

2.in this exit you either check against the workflow runtime tables whe=
ther
there is a relevant instance (workitem) with exactly your object OR you=

check against a field of you object (might be an unneaded field or a
customer field) which you use as an indicator for being in a workflow
process. you might set a flag in this field at the beginning of your
workflow process an delete it at the end.

3. if you find out (in the exit) that the object is part of an active
workflow process you raise an error message '...is not aloud for any ch=
ange
but may be viewed...' or something like that.

usualy this works fine AND sap is using the first technique (searching =
the
runtime tables) itself in a few standard workflows (e.g. treasury).

hope i could be of any help,
regards, michael

"Dart, Jocelyn" <jocelyn.dart at sap.com>@MITVMA.MIT.EDU> am 03.07.2001
01:40:54
Hinweis: Dieses Mail kommt aus einer fremden Dom=E4ne!

Bitte antworten an SAP Workflow Users' Group <SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU>

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Kopie:
Thema: Re: preventing changes once WF underway

Hi John,
You can only prevent changes to a sales document if the transactions
around it allow you to block it in some way.   Perhaps someone with
sales specific knowledge can help here.

If you can't block it, another technique is to set up parallel paths
in your workflow that wait on events indicating that the sales document=

has changed.  If it has changed, then send a mail to everyone who has
reviewed it so far telling them it has changed, then retrigger your
triggering event to raise a new workflow for the changed sales document=
.

You do need to be careful about overlap - for instance if your agents
change the sales document using the workflow and this raises the same
events which is used to terminate the work item.
In this case you may need to add a check function module
to the event to check whether there is both a work item and an event
item waiting for the event, and close the work item only if there is mo=
re
than one event.  (Hope that makes sense, you are basically just trying
to make sure the event will trigger the correct path in your workflow).=

Or you could use the check function module to check that the
event creator is an agent of the waiting work item.

Hope that helps.
Regards,
        Jocelyn Dart
Consultant (BBP, Ecommerce, Internet Transaction Server, Workflow)
SAP Australia
Email jocelyn.dart at sap.com <mailto:jocelyn.dart at sap.com>
Tel: +61 412 390 267
Fax: +61 2 9935 4880

-----Original Message-----
From: John A Haworth [mailto:jhoworth at csc.com]
Sent: Monday, 2 July 2001 11:33 PM
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: preventing changes once WF underway

HI all

Could anyone offer advice on the following:

I have a sales document that, once created has to go though a number of=

review panels, how can I prevent further changes being made to the sale=
s
document, whilst it is going through the various reviews, e.g. for
consistency, I dont want item quantities being inadvertently changed wh=
ilst
the doc is between the various reviews (by non-workflow agents), the
workflow agents themselves could make changes.

Thanks in advance

John

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