Transports

A Customizing order is required to model processes. At the latest when a process is activated, an SAP Workflow template is created automatically. This is a cross-client repository object that requires a workbench request. For systems in which Customizing and development are separated by clients, an RFC connection must therefore be set up so that the SAP Workflow templates can be created directly in the Customizing client via RFC in the development client. This is part of the BPF Global settings and documented directly in the corresponding field for the RFC destination.

For (active) processes to function correctly, the Customizing and Workbench requests must always be imported simultaneously. When you select the transport, you must therefore pay close attention to the transport requests in which the changes are recorded.

Versioning Workflow Templates

When a process is versioned, a workflow version is always also created. During transport, however, only the active version is transported. New versions are automatically created on the target system if they are actually new versions in terms of content. However, new versions may also be created if they are re-imported, so that the current operation is not disrupted. This is because the active version is used by users at the time of the import and is therefore protected.

Since the process and workflow versions can only be uniquely assigned in the source system of the processes, it is never possible to subsequently change a process in a target system, regardless of the system change option.

Workflow Buffering

For performance reasons, the SAP Workflow runtime environment uses various buffers. Among other things, the active version is also buffered. When transporting new versions, it is therefore necessary to invalidate these buffers. During normal transport, this takes place fully automatically. On the development system, ProProcess ensures that the buffers are invalidated in all clients during activation.
Especially if a separate client is used on a development system for testing, the above measure can ensure that an activated (workflow) version is immediately active. However, from the time a new process version is activated, the workflow version and the process version are no longer consistent in other clients, since the workflow template is cross-client and the modeling data is client-specific. Newly activated processes can therefore only be restarted once the modeling data has been transferred to the test client(s).

If errors occur in connection with the transport and activation of workflow templates, processes may no longer start or errors may occur. The Troubleshooting topic contains step-by-step instructions to help you analyze errors.