Export/move attachments

[Former Member]

Hello,

Our company has a central document storage strategy for all Purchasing documents including Sourcing documents. Could anyone please help throw light on capabilities of SAP Sourcing to allow attachments to be moved out of the system. Are any attachments exported as part of the standard integration with ECC. What are the other options we could explore?

Any thoughts would greatly be appreciated.

Thanks,

MP

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

As far as I know, attachments are not supported via Standard integration between E-Sourcing and ECC. Once we publish the outline agreements, only the meta data information flows from E-Sourcing to ECC.

One of the ways of exploring this could be Scheduled tasks. We have setup these tasks to send reports from the system and these can be in .xls, .pdf format etc. These go in as attachments to the specific users in emails.

When you say attachments to be moved out of the system, do you mean the contract documents itself? Or are you referring to the attachments that are stored at the Master / Sub Agreement level?

Thanks,

Vikram

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Vikram,

We are using the Sourcing module. I am referring to documents that are attached/uploaded to the RFX by buyers and suppliers. These are visible by clicking on "Attachments". For example, buyers receive several documents (example item specs) from other teams and attach them to the RFX. In addition, suppliers also attach supporting documentation. We are exploring ways to move these files to our cental location.

Thanks,

MP

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi MP,

SAP Sourcingt/CLM stores attachments in the attachment table as a BLOB object.

Though you can acieve to retrieve and replicate the attachment document in another system, it is not possible to move the attachment out of SAP Sourcing completely..

Thanks,

Baski

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Baski,

Could you please elaborate a little on your answer. How would it be possible to replicate to another system? Would we use reports? We can leave the original attachments in the Sourcing system, but is it possible to copy them to another location?

Thanks,

MP

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I found 3 classes below which are related to Attachments:

AttachmentIfc

AttachmentSubIBeanIfc

AttachmentValueIBeanIfc

Again, these are pertaining to Contracts and not RFx. There is a getAttachment() thing also which looks indicative but not conclusive as I personally haven't tried this before.

Request someone in the forum who has experience on these lines to throw some more light.

Thank you,

Vikram Shukla

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Do you have Netweaver KM integration enabled? In that case all key documents are already kept in KM.

Before sharing the idea, would like to let you know that I don't have any experience on such document extraction or heard about such replication

Here are some thoughts on how this can be done, based on the KM integration sc

1. Know what all attachments you want to extract to the target system. It may not be all the documents by may some specific ones like the Contract document.

2. In some of the script defnitoins, let the other system know the attachement IDs

3. A file download servlet is in place, invoke them with the attachment ID to get the Document in a HTTP IO stream

Other options are write some IAPI schedule task to extract from DB and store it to a central dir and let the other system pick the files from here..

Look at file attachment table and the related interfaces as mentioned by Vikram...

Some points to care about are"

1. make sure the whole document is not kept into memeory. try to do a strep if you are choosing to write your own data extractor, to prevent OOM issue

2. set appropriate mime type

Thanks, Baski

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Baski and Vikram,

Thanks for your excellent pointers. I will try to evaluate amd implement these.

Regards,

MP