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

[Mike Gambier]

Hi John,
 
As a precaution I had already arranged for our instance linkages to be backed up in a Transport and reapplied as part of our Build process following the upgrade, as we spotted that exact same problem early on. But thanks for reminding me :)
 
We always use 'Do Not Change Linkage' anyway because of our volumes and the risk of massive penalties if we don't progress some Workflows immediately.
 
Oh, and another thing, I'm asking SAP to turn off are these blasted SWF_RUN 641 messages (Method &1->&2 executed successfully) being posted in SWWWIRET every time a step actually works. We've had nearly 1.5 million of these things already and they serve no use whatsoever!
 
Mike GT



Subject: RE: Upgrade to ECC 6 from 4.6c => the aftermath...so far...Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 09:37:03 -0600From: Scheinoha.John at basco.comTo: SAP-WUG at mit.eduCC: coyle.pat at basco.com


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 GambierSent: Monday, January 19, 2009 4:39 AMTo: sap-wug at mit.eduSubject: 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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