Deleted articles in ME33K search help

[Former Member]

A contract number in ME33K can be found by using purchasing documents for material. Though, when I search for a material, sometimes multiple contracts are displayed. In all contracts but one, the article has been put in the trash but it still is displayed in the list. This means that I have to enter all the contracts and search for the places where it is located just to see if it has been deleted or not. Is there any way to permanently delete an article in a way that makes it disappear completeley and not still be in a contract with a trashcan-icon next to it?

[JL23]

You can only permanently deleted an article (or material) after it is nowhere used somewhere. This means you would need to close and delete your contract and call-offs and inventory and bill of materials etc etc and archive all those documents and only then a material can be permanently deleted by archiving.

ME33K has no real selection screen, just a document number and all you have is a F4 help to search for documents.

If you search by material then you get all contracts with that material. And even a deleted contract item fulfills the search criteria.

Why do you actually search with this specific material if you finally are disappointed that you found something? Especially if you get the idea to delete the article permanently then it would not make much sense to use this article number for a search either.

You can ask your ABAPers to add another search help include that returns only contracts with where the material is in an un-deleted item line . It could also be done by using the search help user exit to omit items that are deleted.