Importing transport requests into an ABAP system is easy – just a few clicks and the whole queue gets imported. But you should think before you click. You should have an import strategy. Or maybe several ones depending on the system in which you would like to import. Some strategies come with higher risks but are quicker, others are safer but slower. It might be possible to accept a higher risk when it comes to imports into a test system than when importing into a production system.
The challenge is to balance between risk and speed. For example, you may want to test early and often to detect possible issues at an early stage even if the feature is maybe not complete or ready for end users. This requires imports soon after a new development is finished to allow tests and fixes. On the other hand, especially when it comes to imports into a production system, you only want to import new developments where you can be sure (as much as possible) that the changed functionality works correctly. For these and other reasons, you might need different transport strategies for different systems.
You can find information about Transport Strategies in the CTS on the SAP Help Portal. To make this clear from the start: There is no completely secure online import that comes without any risk for on-premise or SAP S/4HANA cloud, private edition.
But there are things that you can do or consider to make imports as smooth as possible, depending on the requirements that you have for imports – whether it’s more ‘sooner and often’ or ‘as safe as possible’.
Planning Import Times
The best time for imports is when your system is not needed by business users. This applies especially to production systems. But there might be no time when your system is not needed as business is always running, maybe your users are located around the world… So, you should plan carefully when imports are executed to disrupt users as little as possible. For test systems, different aspects are relevant: you may need early test results, for example if you are working in DevOps mode. Pipelines help to speed up processes, and possibly additional development or test systems can be used to separate developments that often interfere with each other if they are done in the same system.
If you use CTS to start imports, you can find some hints for this in Planning Imports on the SAP Help Portal.
Sometimes, it is not completely in your hand when an import is done. If you use tools that are based on CTS, such as for example Change Request Management of SAP Solution Manager, these tools can be responsible for starting the import. In Change Request Management, if you use an Urgent Change, this happens when you change the status of the corresponding change document. You can find information when imports are started in the topic Importing Transport Requests on the SAP Help Portal.
There are tools or measures available in Change Request Management and Quality Gate Management that can help you make the imports more secure: there is the Cross-System Object Lock (CSOL) and Downgrade Protection (DGP), and Cross Reference Check. You can find more information about both on the SAP Help Portal at Cross-System Object Lock, Downgrade Protection, and Cross Reference Check.
If you use gCTS, imports are started by different actions, for example, cloning a repository, pulling a commit, or switching a branch of a repository. And if you use pipelines, imports are done when a pipeline runs and the step gctsDeploy is executed.
Therefore, please also make sure that activities in these tools (gCTS, CI-servers, Change Request Management etc) that include imports are executed when the import best matches the expected usage of systems, either to provide imports as soon as possible or to protect business users.
Reduce Import Times
If you are looking for options to minimize the time spent on custom transports when updating or upgrading a system, you may find the blog post Reduce time for customer transports in Upgrade and Conversion projects to SAP S/4HANA helpful. SAP Note 1223360 - Composite SAP Note: Performance optimization during import provides information about how to optimize your imports.
In addition, if you need more information about integrating your own transports in an upgrade or update process, please read through the blog post Integrating customer transport requests in updates and upgrades. In the Software Update Manager (SUM) an option to integrating customer transports into the update procedure is available. You can use this feature to integrate customer transports into the update procedure to reduce business downtime. For more information, please look into the Software Update Manager Guide that fits for your system. In there, you can find the chapter Integrating Customer Transports into the Update Procedure. You can also use this procedure outside of an upgrade and ‘just’ import the transport requests that are in your buffer file. You can also find more information on this in the same chapter of your SUM guide.
Using gCTS can also be beneficial when it comes to import times. Different from when using CTS, gCTS imports every object only once. This means: a new transport request is generated in the background that contains all objects that are different between the commit that is currently active and the one that you decided to pull – this includes additions, changes, and deletions. With this, each object is only imported once in the latest version. Intermediate versions that may have been created during the development and testing phases to resolve issues and make additional changes are not part of the import.
Transport into an active System
If you execute imports into a system while it is in use, you need to take special measures to avoid endangering running processes. This applies especially to production systems. Inconsistencies can occur if you execute imports while systems are in use. This is because objects may be in use by a business process while a new version of the same object is imported. Moreover, this can cause dumps, timeouts, and deadlocks that lead to a disrupted import.
If you have an issue like the ones previously mentioned when importing, you can try the following:
Setting the parameter parallel will automatically activate an automatic repeat of the import. An auto-repeat is eventually executed several times. The last repeat will always use just one import process to make sure that the import doesn’t fail because of a deadlock. So this parameter can also increase the stability
For more details and links to related SAP Notes, which provide more details about how to solve different issues, please check SAP Note 2467088 - Transporting into a active system.
Check the impact of transports into running systems
The SAP Solution Tools Plug-In ST-PI comes with the program /SDF/CMO_TR_CHECK or the transaction /SDF/TRCHECK that can help you with this. Amongst others, you can use this program to find out how critical it is to import a certain transport request while business users are working on the system. You can find more details and a description on how to use and configure the program in SAP Note 2475591 - Transport Check Report.
Also in SAP Community, you can find blog posts about how this program can be used. For example:
