Copy a standard program, best practices.

[Former Member]

Hi guys,

We have 400 z programs in our company, and some of them are 90% a copy from standard programs with new fuctionality.

I know this is our last resource, copy a standard program and modify, (first find user exits, config, notes, etc)

I want to know that is a best practice or not.

When we need to copy a standard we do:

1) copy the main program

2) copy and rename all includes

3) copy and rename all RFC.

4) modify the code that we need.

What happens is that sometimes we have exact copies of standard includes or rfc only with Z, we do this because we dont want to lose functionality in our z, for notes or, updates.

waiting for comments.

tks in advance

JS

[Former Member]

Best practice, IMHO, is DON'T COPY and whack and hack on SAP programs. SAP tries to be all things to all users...you may use < 10% of what you copy! If you do an upgrade, then you may need to do the whole thing all over again, but how will you know??

Best practice, again IMHO, is to use enhancements, BADIs, exits, variants, etc., to modify or enhance the behavior of the standard program, or simply write one that does precisely what you want if the SAP cannot be used. I'll bet you've got about 395 Z programs that need to be discarded and the users returned to SAP standard with enhancements.