Weird behaviour regarding email notifications for ATC exemption requests

[BaerbelWinkler]

Hi All!

We recently switched our central ATC-system to now run on S/4HANA (7.56) and most of the functionality works as expected. We are however experiencing some weird issues when it comes to exemption requests and the notification emails they should trigger and I'd like to pinpoint the reasons for those in order to eliminate them.

When a developer asks for an exemption from one of the satellite systems, the notification is triggered immediately and we - as Exemption approvers - see it right away in the exemption browser. So far , so good.

Issue 1

We set up a specific user named ATC_APPROVER who has the SAP_SATC_QC (ATC Quality Expert) role. For this user, we use an email address (atc_approver...) which works as a distribution list, so that I and two of my colleagues get notified about pending exemption requests right away. Developers are asked to always use this specific user when requesting exemptions.

If this happens, the notification email shows up in SOST and we do get it delivered into our inboxes. If they however use one of the three individuals who are defined as exemption approvers, no email gets triggered. There's no entry in SOST and therefore also no email in the selected approver's inbox. There's no dump and  SU53 doesn't really tell us much either, unfortunately. Each of us has the ATC Administrator Role (SAP_SATC_ADMIN) but not the ATC Quality Expert role the ATC_APPROVER has. Do we need to have this this role added explicitely to our user accounts or is it included in the ADMIN role? If the latter, what else might be missing, if anything?

Issue 2

While testing the process yesterday with a colleague, something weird happened with the notification emails: instead of the email-address listed in his user-account, the recipient's email address - i.e. "atc_approver..." showed up in SOST and the sent email. Is there some logic somewhere deep inside the ATC exemption processing, which swaps a sender's email address under certain circumstances? And if there is, what are those circumstances?

Thanks much for any ideas, suggestion or pointers you may have!

Cheers

Bärbel

[BaerbelWinkler]

@OlgaDolinskaja 

Hi Olga,

do you happen to have an idea of what is going on with regards to the mentioned email issues related to our central ATC-system? Should I raise an incident with the above information?

Thanks much and cheers

Bärbel

[BjörnJüliger]

Issue 1: ATC approvers must generally subscribe to receive email notifications about exemptions assigned to them, see our documentation. Your individual approvers probably didn't subscribe. This works for the technical user with the distribution list because there is an exception for technical users - since technical users cannot logon as dialog users, they cannot actually manually subscribe and are considered always subscribed by ATC.

Issue 2: It depends on what kind of notification this was - the emails that an exemption was approved/rejected are sent from the email address of the approver entered in the exemption. The description given is a bit too vague to be certain.

[BaerbelWinkler]

@BjörnJüliger 

Thanks, Björn! I apparently missed the task to subscribe individual approvers to receive the notification emails. So that resolves issue #1.

For issue #2 this was triggered by an exemption request from a colleague. Instead of his expected email-address as the sender, the one associated with our technical ATC_APPROVER user was used for both recipient (expected) and sender (not expected). So, I'm wondering where and why the sender's email address was overwritten during the process.

Cheers

Bärbel

[BjörnJüliger]

I looked into this - as a fallback mechanism we indeed use the recipient's email address as the sender if something goes wrong when we try to obtain the requester's email address. Maybe the email address for the requester's user account was not properly maintained in your user data?

[BaerbelWinkler]

@BjörnJüliger 

Thanks, Björn! My colleague's email address looks properly maintained in our central ATC system. Would the fallback mechanism perhaps also kick in if something is off with authorizations or the like? Would you mind sharing the code where this mechanism kicks in? I could then try to find out what is causing it either via debugging or a dynamic logpoint.

Cheers

Bärbel

[BjörnJüliger]

Oh, we don't look in the central ATC system for this (since sometimes developers don't have accounts in the central system), but we try to read the email address of the user that really requested the exemption from the development system.

If the email is maintained there, too, then it's probably an issue with the RFC connection from the central system to the development system. Common issues are:

1. You're exclusively using the developer scenario and your object provide for the development system doesn't actually have an RFC connection attached to it
2. The RFC destination from the object provider is misconfigured and e.g. lacks authorizations

If you can't find anything wrong with these aspects, you can try debugging CL_SATC_CI_EMAIL_NOTIFIER=>GET_SENDER_EMAIL_ADDRESS - we do the fallback to recipient-as-sender when this method returns nothing.