Changing Length of key in Coding Mask

[Former Member]

Hi Experts,

This client has been using SAP since few years.

So they have their coding mask key assigned as "1". And for some of their internal and capex projects they are using the key with "X-0000.00.00" This is going fine.

Their majority customer projects are using Assembly processing where the Sales order number is assigned as project ID with two zeros prefix.

eg. if sales order number is 200000, then project id created automatically is 00200000.

Now for this new business, they want to use a separate process (not assembly processing ), they would just create Projects manually and link it with sales order and go on from there.

Here they want to keep the project coding mask similar to their Assembly process projects..ie 00200000 range.

a) How do we get this done? ie to create project in that number range when creating manually? System does allow to create any number. So do I just put in some validation so they remain in that range?

b) If I want to change the coding mask key from 1 to 2 or 3, is it advisable now ? what happens to the project already created with that key 1.

Appreciate your comments/suggestions.

Thanks,

Krishna

[Paulo_Vitoriano · Accepted solution]

Hi Krishna,

Normally you do not change the keys for coding masks.  You can create new keys and you can lock old keys, but not changing from 1 to 2 for example. Instead, creating a key 2 and locking a key 1.

If there is no key for the coding mask to conflict with, then it is wide open to use.  And in that case you can control it with validation.

Regards,

Paulo

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thank you Paulo for the confirmation.

That helps.

Krishna

[NathanGenez · Accepted solution]

My first thought... and I've seen this before where customers implement PS in a narrow manner for a single business... is that there isn't a clean way out of this.  They've made a big mistake by defining their mask with a single leading digit/char and that greatly limits how they can easily name their projects going forward. 

It's possible to edit the mask and re-name all of the existing projects but it would be a significant development effort.  It would be a lot of fun to take on but the customer would have to be willing to understand the risks of renaming their projects.  i.e., how bad do they want it?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Right Nathan!

They probably were planning to use Assembly processing where coding mask has nothing much to do.

They were using the coding mask for some internal projects which are very few. But nevertheless, it was a bad idea to just have one character in the mask Key.

Its makes it difficult to cope up with new process.

They don't want to change it now, I was just exploring the possibility. For now they just want to use the same numbering convention they have for the Assembly processing projects, but without using assembly processing. So I guess it would just need to write some validations.