Extension of Attachment Services for SAPUI5 FIORI APPS To SAP ArchiveLink

[bonafuwa7678]

Dear Experts,

Landscape: SAP S/4HANA 1610 FPS01, Fully-Activated Appliance

Deployment Model: On-Premise (Hosted)

We have successfully implemented the use cases (Storage Scenarios) for the SAP ArchiveLink solution for the above landscape by storing documents on external content servers / repositories; this we achieved seamlessly with the SAP GUI based transactions including those running in the LaunchPad and being rendered in the SAP GUI for HTML (that is, the Transaction typed FIORI apps).

However, replicating the same steps with the SAPUI5 FIORI Apps deployed on the same server has been elusive. The closest functionality to experiment with is the Attachment Services (AS). We had hoped that with AS support for GOS as claimed here (ref: Attachment Service), some entries would have been created in the link table e.g. TOA01 during a "Create" process by the SAPUI5 FIORI app to link the structured business document in SAP to the corresponding semi-structure document in the external repository.

We had maintained the KPRO customizing entries and done endless debugging of the ODATA back-end services without much success.

Our next experimentation will be to perform an "In-App extensibility" to address our business requirements but we want to check with SAP first to be sure that we are not missing something out.

Thanks

[karim_benakli_kb]

Did you find a solution for your issue ?

[karim_benakli_kb]

Good morning,

The way S/4HANA manages Attachments is indeed based on GOS. But in contrary to what you were expected, GOS is not using the TOAxx tables for storing link information but various other tables in a quite more complex way.

We've create an add-on which is especially made for supporting these requirements of connecting an external content server to SAP, with automatic retrieval and sending of metadata to the external content server, and supporting as well Archivelink as GOS as the Fiori Attachment Services. The tool is named YAC.

One of the many advantages of the tool is that it works with all SAP screens in standard, SAP GUI and Fiori Apps, and you don't need to change anything in the Apps (no need to add a plug-in or something else).

Below is a comparison between YAC and other classical Archivelink connectors. I can also send you a complete datasheet if you wish, just let me know.

Rgds,

K. Benakli - karim.benakli@znk.lu

YAC Advantages vs other connectors

(1) Full support of attachments in Fiori App (new technology see below)(2) Retrieves metadata in all cases, including GOS and Fiori(3) Ensure no orphans are created in your document management system(4) Full control over the way attachments are versioned and deleted
(1) A new Attachment Service is used as part of S/4HANA for the Fiori Apps. This service works on basis of GOS with a few new features (eg concept of draft attachments).YAC fully supports this new API directly without any change required in the Fiori App ! Other connectors don't and can't because they are not plugged inside S/4HANA. What YAC does that others don't:- Retrieve all necessary metadata of the object on which attachments are created in a Fiori App and send them together with the attachment to your DMS, and do it instantaneously as soon as the save button has been pressed !- Recognise when an attachment is deleted in a Fiori App and communicate the info to your DMS as soon as the save button is pressed.(2) The way of managing the links between the SAP objects and the attachments is very different between classical Archivelink scenarios and GOS/Fiori. Most of the connectors on the market do support metadata retrieval for the classical Archivelink scenarios but none (to our current knowledge) do support it for GOS and Fiori Apps. This is maily due to the quite complex way the links are managed in this case which requires the connector to be plugged on the SAP ABAP stack (as YAC is) in order to be able to capture all attachments related events and to retrieve the relevant link information for further metadata processing.(3) YAC sends the attachment and its metadata to your DMS only when it is effecively linked to an SAP object, thus only when metadata are available. YAC does also detect when an attachment is deleted and immediately sends the information to your DMS. Other connectors can to that for classical Archivelink scenarios only, not for GOS and Fiori !(4) With YAC you can decide yourself how to manage the versioning of the attachments and the behavior in case of deletion in SAP. YAC detects when a new version of an attachment is loaded and provides the information to your DMS allowing, depending on your DMS functionalities, to automatically create minor versions, major versions or to simply overwrite. In a similar way, YAC provides deletion information to your DMS, allowing then to decide whether the attachment also has to be deleted, or simply marked as deleted in your DMS.