Advance Workflow in Incentive Management SF configration

[Sayyid]

Greetings,
I have a few questions If you could help, it would be appreciated.
- Is Advance workflow only for a closed loop workflow monitoring and processing or does this have other functionalities?
- Can we execute a pipeline of incentive management form a workflow case?
- What are the ways a workflow case can be triggered? do we have to manually create a case each time, or can we trigger it from any other ways e.g(with automation, or when a pipeline is run on Incentive management can that trigger a workflow case for approval of the pipeline)?
- Is there any resource to learn how to connect to IM database using direct db access.

[mbroeker]

Hello @Sayyid ,

1. What do you have in mind with other functionalities? The workflow component is focused on the creating and working with custom workflows and their surrounded processes (like sending out mail notifications to case assignees). 

2. You can trigger API calls from a workflow case with a script. This way you could use the incentive management pipeline API endpoint to start pipelines from workflow

3. There is a Workflow API you can use to work with workflow objects from outside of workflow. You can find the documentation here: Workflow API Documentation

4. As far as I know you need to contac SAP Support for that. It is recommended to work with the IM APIs instead of direct DB Access though (see Accessing Incentive Management Database from Workflow )

[Sayyid]

Thank you for your response.

I would like to discuss some additional functionalities I have in mind, specifically the possibility of creating a workflow for payment approvals, pipelines, and all document approval for IM.

Due to some issues with the APIs, integration between WF and IM was not possible, so we reached out to SAP for direct database access from WF to IM. However, I am currently unable to find any information or resources regarding the use of direct database access for advanced workflows and incentive management. The SAP Help page at "https://help.sap.com/docs/Advanced_Workflow/b7cb13f8b6a04157a722ad9ddfde4a28/e0800580d0444641b762ae2..." provides very little information on how this works. There are no examples or anything by seeing which we could understand how it work and how can we solve our problems with it.

[mbroeker]

I think for payment approvals and pipeline you should stick to the APIs since there is a good functionality provided by them. We used a service user for the authentication part, calling the IM APIs from WF is definitely possible. Maybe you can first try to execute set up an easy example call with one of the API Endpoints and if that works, developing your required logic is not that hard anymore since you can reuse most of the code. 

Regarding the document approvals, I am not sure if there are public API services for that, you might need to ask SAP Support. 

We haven't worked with direct database connection between Workflow and IM yet, so I unfortunately can't help you with that.