SAP IDoc Quick Tips

In this excerpt from Espresso Tutorials Virtual Book Club Meeting: What on Earth is an SAP IDoc? author Jelena Perfiljeva shares a few SAP IDoc quick tips.

The first tip, I didn’t even know about until I started working on my book. There is a very helpful button that is called object for services. That allows you to navigate between the IDoc and the document that is associated with it. I knew about this relationship before from the document to the IDoc.

For example, if you have an interface for the billing document, you can open an invoice. You can use this object for services button, which is in the top left corner, usually. You can navigate to the related IDoc. I never really noticed that you can also go the other way around. When you are looking at the IDoc you can use the same button to go back to the either document that’s called the creation of this IDoc or document that was created by this IDoc. It’s actually really helpful because before that I was just working as a IDoc status and trying to figure out document number from it.

The second tip that I would like to share: I didn’t have space or time to explore at length in the book. There is a new transaction for IDoc monitor. It’s called WLF. That’s for IDoc. It’s available starting from enhancement pack five or six. There is certain support pack. I know that they have to be on as mentioned in the SAP note.

Really, we have the transaction on one of our SAP systems that’s been upgraded. I really like this transaction. Even though it was meant to be for business users, I started using it more than just for the old-fashioned or file transactions because it’s very convenient. It makes even selection criteria much more simpler. For instance, in the old transactions, we had to specify whether we want outbound or inbound IDoc. We had to enter a number, like one or two.

In the new transaction, you don’t even have a number. You just specify inbound or outbound. Just a small thing that makes it much more pleasant experience. This transaction also combines the functionality of many transactions into one. You don’t have to open many transactions to do different things. You can just use one and do all those actions together. If your SAP system is on enhancement pack four – six, I really encourage you to look up that new transaction and see what functionality is available in it.

The recording from the Espresso Tutorials Virtual Book Club Meeting: What on Earth is an IDoc is now available.

What on Earth is an SAP IDoc? author Jelena Perfiljeva is a Technical SAP Analyst at Elster Solutions, LLC in North Carolina. Since her SAP career started by accident 10 years ago, she has worked as an ABAP programmer and general SAP problem solver in the wholesale, professional service, and manufacturing industries. Her duties include implementation and support of numerous EDI and IDoc interfaces. Jelena’s lack of any official SAP credentials has not prevented her from becoming an SAP Mentor, an SCN blogger, and a speaker at international SAP events. She was SCN Member of the Month in April 2013. When she is not debugging SAP or answering questions on SCN, she enjoys using Google for finding new food recipes to test on her unsuspecting family members.