Field length restrictions - any workaround possible?

[Former Member]

Ladies and gents,

Here is a question for which I would love to get some feedback.

In an ongoing project, i'm migrating from a legacy system that has document numbers longer than 30 characters. I'm looking to see whether you have any suggestions as how to handle this in SAP.

My ideas are either around extending the document number, but that really does not appeal to my and i dont think it is feasible.

The other idea was if there was some way of extending the length of characteristics. Why anybody in SAP thought the longest meta-data you would need is 30 characters it beyond me though.

The last option, that could work is to add an include to table DRAW, and change the original screens to include the new field(s) added.

So anybody with similar experiences, either successes or failures, please come forward.

As always, points will be given etc etc.

Regards,

Espen Leknes

Edited by: Espen Leknes on Feb 28, 2008 2:49 PM

[christoph_hopf · Accepted solution]

Hi Espen,

from SAP point of view I can only tell you that this restriction is due to the field definition of table DRAW. I never came accross a system where this field was increased to more than 30 characters.

As this is defined on database level I'm not sure if this really works as the document number is used to create the document key for several different other functionalities like object links.

Best regards,

Christoph

[Former Member]

Hi Christoph, and thanks for your reply.

I can see that my original posting was a bit lacking in detail. I do not need to use the old document number as document number in SAP, i only need to be able store some metadata of length longer than 30 characters. Ideally i would love to have a string type characteristics where i could store text in a similar type to the long text description of the document.