Attachments and Business Objects

[Dart, Jocelyn]

Hi Casey,
There are different types of attachments.
 
Attachments to a work item are created as SAPOffice documents and
stored in the relevant SAPOffice tables.
 
Attachments made using Generic Object Services are different -
I believe they are stored using Business Document Services (BDS)
which is a whole document management system within SAP.
 
In both cases documents in external formats are usually held as binary
data streams in SAP and can only be accessed via the relevant transactions,
routines, etc.   They do have security over them but I suspect the
BDS may provide more extensive functionality in this area as it is a
more recent addition to SAP.  However I don't know much about BDS
so you might want to read up on that.
 
Regards,
        Jocelyn Dart
Consultant (SRM, EBP, Workflow)
and co-author of the book
"Practical Workflow for SAP"
SAP Australia
email: jocelyn.dart at sap.com
phone: +61 412 390 267
fax:   +61 2 9935 4880
 
 
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Smith, Cassaundra [mailto:Cassaundra.Smith at anheuser-busch.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 13 August 2002 5:37 AM
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