Versioning in Transports 

General

Objects are transported within SAP Exchange Infrastructure for the following reasons:

·        To ship objects from the Integration Repository

·        To test a development in the repository or a directory configuration separately

At present there is no infrastructure for the actual transport of objects. Instead you can export objects from one repository/directory to import them into another repository/directory (see: Exporting and Importing Integration Objects).

You must move exported files manually to a corresponding import directory. For reasons of simplicity, this process is referred to as a transport in this section.

Transport Logistics

Integration Repository

Repository objects have one original repository, in other words a repository from which an object originates. Within a repository you can differentiate between original objects and copies by using an attribute of the corresponding software component version.

Due to the originality principle, transport landscapes for repositories are star-shaped:

You should only make changes to an object in the Integration Repository from which the object originates. The new versions of this object are then created when it is imported into the target repository so that the object has the same version in both repositories (see graphic):

As shown here, object versions in the various repositories are consistent. This is ensured by the following mechanisms:

·        You should lock objects in the target repository against entries (see Object Properties in Software Component Versions). Nevertheless, you do have the option of temporarily changing objects in the target repository, but this can lead to a conflict when you import the objects. You can choose between two import variants when importing:

¡        Import and Do Not Resolve Conflicts:
If objects being imported were changed in the target directory, then import is canceled and an error message is displayed.

¡        Import and Resolve Conflicts:
Objects changed in the target repository are overwritten during the import.

·        When you import older object versions to a target repository, all new object versions that already exist there are not overwritten. The older version being imported is visible in the object history following the import. The more recent version remains the most recent version.

This means that multiple imports into a repository can lead to the same end result, regardless of the sequence in which they are imported.

Integration Directory

At configuration time you have the option of testing the configuration in a test directory. If the tests are successful, you can then transport the configuration objects in the test directory to the directory for the productive landscape.

Therefore, at configuration time, transports are not used to ship objects, but to test the configuration separately from the productive landscape before it is used productively as part of SAP Exchange Infrastructure.

·        There are no software component versions in the Integration Directory. The objects in the Integration Directory are instead linked to Business Scenarios and can be exported using Business Scenarios as well.

·        No large transport landscape with multiple directories is required. As a rule, one test directory and one productive directory is sufficient. There is also a test repository and a productive repository.

The configuration objects in the Integration Directory reference objects in the Integration Repository. Therefore, you must transport the objects from the test repository to the productive repository before you import the objects into the productive directory.

In the test scenarios at configuration time, it is not always the case that the most recent version from the test directory is transported to the productive directory. Often an older version is the more appropriate version.Therefore, unlike when importing in the Integration Repository, when importing objects to a directory, version management always creates a new version for the objects:

In the example, the initial version V1 of an object is exported from the test directory. Since a new version ID is created when you import objects to the productive directory (here V3’ for V1), you can import version V1 to the productive directory despite the fact that the more recent versions V2 and V3 have already been imported.