Hi Experts,
It might be sound like a very strange requirement. But yeah we are trying to replicate the book publication activity in an ABAP program.
Before I detail out the plan to get your feedback let me throw some light on the exact requirement we are trying to address.
In a model we will have some 20 BPC reports saved. Now user will have a set of multiple selections for couple of dimensions at a time and we are supposed to accept these variants/selections refresh the report and publish them in the form of a pdf.
Now this is a standard Book Publication feature: You maintain your selection in VarKey of a Book Publication template in various sections. When you are ready to publish the books you go through Publication wizard pick up the template and generate the PDF files which gets stored in Library.
But this activity cannot be accomplished in our case since there is probability of having 4400 unique selections (variant). The main two concerns we see are:
a. We cannot expect users or even IT team to maintain these many combinations in a Book Publication template and to make things worse the selection parameters can change month on month!
b. By some luck even if we address the initial problem the second more serious problem which we face is using the wizard we would be asking users to select one section at a time since our intention is to generate 1 single PDF for a section of Book publication template.
So with all the constraints listed we thought why not replicate the whole Publication activity using a program. The steps in the program would be as follows.
Step 1: Load the BPC report using the get_document of cl_ujf_file_service_mgr class.
Step 2: Get the users selections loaded in a Z table.
Step 3: Pass the user selection to RUN_AXIS_QUERY as they do in Book Publication program
Step 4: Generate a binary file which can be used to publish it as pdf using some function modules.
Request you please provide feedback on our approach or if you feel there are much more simpler ways to address our requirement.
Thanks!
Sumanth