Missing change document for object: bug or missing functionality?

[nicolas_busson]

Hello,

As I do not have enough authorizations to create a Poll in this place, I'm just asking this simple question to see what your opinion is:

if you do not see all changes made on a standard SAP object in its change documents (example: you change a customer firstname, you'll see who changed what and when, but if you change customer lastname nothing is recorded). Would you say:

1) There is a missing functionality in the software that you need to develop yourself?

2) Or there is a bug SAP support needs to fix?

Cheers,

Nick.

[Jelena_Perfiljeva · Accepted solution]

As long as the customer did not do something to disable the change tracking and the fields are very similar (like first name and last name in this example), I'd go with option 2.

[nicolas_busson · Accepted solution]

Hello Jelena,

Thanks for chiming in! To be more precise regarding this issue, no change doc was disabled, and the problem lies in device location (I'm working for a Utility company that is distributing electricity):

- If you change the room number or floor where the device is located, change docs are created.

- If you change the building where the device is located, no change docs...

In other words: if you change a device location and make a "small" mistake (you fill-in 3rd floor when it should have been 4th floor for example), you can always see who made that mistake. But if you screw it up completely and select a completely wrong building, it seems that it is SAP standard design not to log anything... and SAP seems to consider it a best practice to use pen & paper to keep a note of what was done:

And the best thing is: we created a Z transaction a long time ago to include the 5 lines of coding that were missing in SAP standard to log every change correctly. So I decided to post this question on SCN because according to me BAD piece of information is worse than NO information at all (and as far as changeDocs are concerned, incomplete means bad to me because you get the wrong impression that no change ever occur -- while if you had no changeDocs at all you could still doubt it).

So it's just that I'm still wondering if incident processors really believe what they say... or keep trying to make me close any incident they find too hard to fix.

Cheers!

Nick.

[Jelena_Perfiljeva · Accepted solution]

I don't know anything about IS-U, so I might be off on this, but based on the limited information in your post and in the note 1810101 on Improvement Finder site I don't see much logic in the SAP response. It could be respondent's Yoda-like grammar or some translation issue, but I don't get at all why adding a change document is "a difficult point" and what security has to do with it.

If the 'Change document' checkbox is checked in SE11 then the change document should be created. The whole "difficult" development is to call a function module, as far as I recall. Not a rocket science. The argument "there is no error because it is based on our very bad design and we were too lazy to add a few additional lines" seems rather laughable.

The Improvement Finder page does not say anything about specifically excluding change documents. It just goes about the new functionality. I can only guess that change documents were not specifically put in the specification, but perhaps it was because it was just expected. E.g. we don't put in the spec that changes need to be written to the database, some things are just implied.

Even though technically it is not an error, personally I don't see any valid reason why this must not be done. Again, it's not my area of expertise, but I strongly suspect that the whole talk about the complexity is a brush-off. "Shorry, couldn't make it".

P.S. I'm curious how this would work in "The Cloud".

[nicolas_busson · Accepted solution]

Jelena you nailed it. As always.