Upgrade to ECC 6 from 4.6c => the aftermath...so far...

[Scheinoha, John]

Mike,
 
   When we upgraded from 4.6C to ECC 5.0, we noticed the upgrade changed
our Receiver Err Feedback value from "3 Do not Change Linkage" to "1
Deactivation of Linkage".  We did not notice this change until a
workflow error occurred, and subsequent workflow instances errored after
that.  It happened to our Purchase Requisition application and plenty of
workflow errors occurred in a very short period of time.  
 
   You might want to review SWEQADM > Basic Data tab > Receiver Error
Feedback value.
 
   The SAP Inbox feature of "Double-clicking on an object in the same
window is also fully functional in ECC 5.0 and I assume ECC 6.  This
checkbox needs to be checked in the Personal workflow settings as a
default value in order to view SAP workflow objects.
 
Hope this helps and thanks for the ECC 6 update.  We'll be upgrading to
ECC 6 later this year.
 
Thanks,
John Scheinoha
Briggs & Stratton 
(414) 256 - 5136

________________________________

From: sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf
Of Mike Gambier
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 4:39 AM
To: sap-wug at mit.edu
Subject: Upgrade to ECC 6 from 4.6c => the aftermath...so far...


Hi,
 
Well it happened...we upgraded over the weekend...and things seem to be
creaking a little, but so far so good. :)
 
We had a problem with SAP's XPRA for Event Linkages that needed to be
tackled on the day by Oracle DBAs. We couldn't use SAP's single-stream
version of the code because we had 8 million table entries to move from
SWEINSTCOU to SWFDEVINST so we converted their program to a mutli-stream
job to run in parallel. But on the day our Basis people decided to
import table statsitics from a Pre-Prod system which skewed the SQL to
run with very poorly optimised indexes. Once we spotted why the job was
taking so long and producing so little the stats were updated on both
the old and the new tables again and the app servers bounced and the job
re-run again. It finished in 20 minutes instead of the 6 hours it looked
like it might take, yay! :)
 
Then, a few hours later with the system up, a quick scan of SWWWIDH
entries with a Status of '02' showed up some issues we weren't aware of.
We had about 4k deadlines that stubbornly refused to fire properly. They
kept coming back even after using the new Transaction SWF_ADM_SWWWIDH to
reset them.
 
After a bit of sleuthing it turned out that they were related to old
instances of Workflows (mostly the same template which was handy) that
now were suffering from syntax errors because their container definition
had become invalid during the upgrade. ECC 6 has introduced a new
vulnerability here that we might have to have squished by an OSS Note. 
 
In our case a few versions of a common Workflow had an element that
pointed to a SAP-defined structure that had been deleted as part of the
upgrade. Luckily it was obvious that the developer had simply wanted to
find a simple BOOLE-BOOLE flag but had unwisely chosen something else
instead. 
 
In this situation SAP's new code detects that it is dealing with an old
WF instance and switches to a 'Persistence' version of its Container
ABAP Class inside CL_SWF_CNT_FACTORY, namely CL_SWF_CNT_WF_PERSISTENCE.
This Class duly calls old FMs (SWD_GET_WF_CONTAINER_TABLE) to fetch the
Container Definition for the version of the instance in question which
end up selecting from old tables SWDSWFCONT and SWD_WFCONT. And it's
here that the definition of our element was suddenly found to be
pointing to a bogus structure and field when the element was
instantiated at runtime.
 
But the new code can't cope with this syntax error very well and simply
bombs out with an Exception that is eventually caught in the stack:
 
  IF NOT por-bus_key IS INITIAL.
    l_retcode = l_pmanager->load( ).                  <== Return Code
comes back here...
    CASE l_retcode.
      WHEN 0.
      WHEN 95.
<== Exception bombs out here...
        lr_cx_cnt = instance->get_last_exception( ).
        RAISE EXCEPTION TYPE cx_swf_utl_obj_create_failed
          EXPORTING
            t100_msg = lr_cx_cnt->t100_msg
            previous = lr_cx_cnt.
 
The upshot of this was that we couldn't even display these Deadline
steps in SWI1, let alone reset their deadlines, because of a nasty error
crawling out. 
 
In the end I had to resort to surgery and update the old 4.6c tables
directly before we could move these on :)
 
We have some SAP guys here on site so I'll nag them to have this
situation looked at a bit more. I have a feeling though that they've
missed an XPRA or something here because I can imagine other clients
suffering from just this sort of thing were SAP have zapped their own
DDIC structures and Worklow defintions that were perfectly legitimate in
4.6c suddenly become invalid in ECC 6 and behave erratically like this.
 
Regards,
 
Mike GT


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