Documenting and commenting APO macros

[Former Member]

Documenting macros in terms of their purpose and how they operate is one of those tasks that is very necessary and yet difficult to achieve in a way that clearly communicates to a 3^rd party what is going on.  Part of this problem is due to a piece of functionality singularly missing in SAP macros – the ability to easily add comments like you would to a piece of code.

In this post I will describe how I go about these things.  Happy documenting!

Commenting macros

Although there is no comment option when creating macros you can add comments as follows:

Simple use of steps, action boxes and operators allows you to drop comments pretty much where you please.  Deactivate them using the activate/deactivate button (6th from left in the picture above) so that they do not generate code in the background and so do not interfere with the operation of the macro.  This allows you to make notes as you go along.

Documenting Macros

It is always difficult to find a way to effectively document macros – sometimes a screen dump of the macro is sufficient but when this won’t do, pull the macros you want into the action area and use the menu function Macros > print to give the following:

You can now cut and paste (using CTRL-Y to select) which gives you the text below :

Macro Book: Zxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

   Macros in the Macro Book

       Example of commenting

       Use step for overall comments : ( 1 Iterations :Initial;Initial )

         Action boxes like paragraphs

           Operators for text

           You could do this anywhere in the macro

           Deactivate so they do not interfere with operation of macro

If required you can add icons to the above but these have to be cut from screen prints which can take some time to do.  This results in the layout below:

Having done this you can use the comments function in word to add comments against the various steps without losing the context of the macro flow logic as shown below:

It works for me and allows me to clearly communicate to support people how macros are working.  It also proves a very useful record for my own use.