Attachments and Business Objects

[Zmudzin,Tomasz,VEVEY,GL-DS/DM]

Cassaundra,
 
The standard attachments are stored as SAP Office documents. You will find
more information on their storage / administration in the online help
(that's SAP Library -> Basis -> Basis Services --> Business Workplace in
4.6c).
 
Still storing a large amount of external documents and having additional
security requirements you'd be better off not using the SOFM attachments,
but deploying the built-in Document Management System that allows you to
store the documents on secure media external to SAP database. You may also
want to check the newer Business Document Service.
 
Kind regards,
Tomasz
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Smith, Cassaundra [mailto:Cassaundra.Smith at anheuser-busch.com]
Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 9:37 PM
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Attachments and Business Objects
Importance: High
 
 
Workflow Gurus,
 
We are on SAP vers. 4.6C.  I am working on the development of an ESS
appraisal
workflow.  Our customers are interested in being able to add attachments to
the
appraisal business object which they can call/view at a later date.  For
example, when our Sales Dept does appraisals for employees, they have what
they
call Scorecards which they want to attach to the appraisal as well.  The
Sales
scorecards will hold info on how well the sales employee did with sales over
the
year.  This scorecard document can be in the form of MS Word or Excel.  The
appraisal business object (BUS7026) is currently setup correctly and
attachments
can be created and saved with the object.  It looks like it is using the
whole
Generic Services for Objects functionality.  I read up on this Generic
Services
info and it mainly talked about setting up a content repository, ect...
where
these external documents can be stored.  But I did not set any of this up
and it
seems that these attachment documents are being stored somewhere in SAP.  I
tried debugging the method where you display current object attachments and
it
almost seems cryptic as to how SAP is storing the documents.  My customer
wants
to know where exactly is the attachment being stored - will the location of
the
attachments get cleaned up which means losing the documents without their
knowledge in some near future - and how is security administered on viewing
these documents.  Has anyone dealt with this before.  I have been debugging
four
a couple of days now trying to determine where the physical documents are
being
stored.  So far I have come up with a lot of tables like SOOD, SOFM, SOFD,
SOC3,
ect... which all have locations ids and what looks like some type of
pointers to
some type of locations.  Any help would be appreciated on this matter.
 
Casey