Terms
Use
Appointment
An appointment in the SAP system is an object with a fixed start and end time and other optional attributes. Important attributes are appointment type, participants, and appointment rules. A periodic appointment is a set of appointments (or rather of appointment instances) that result from a common appointment rule. A group appointment is an appointment with multiple participants.
Application attributes are not part of appointments. You can, however, store a reference to your object in an appointment attribute (application GUID) or link your object to the appointment.
An appointment is identified uniquely by a GUID (16 Hex). A periodic appointment also has a single GUID but the individual appointment instances do not.
Appointment Type
The appointment type classifies an appointment as regards content, for example, "Customer appointment", "Training" or "Vacation".
It represents a way of grouping appointments and can be closely linked to application functions in a business application scenario so that, for example, the user branches to an application transaction when they double-click on an appointment. Furthermore, access to such appointments from the SAP appointment calendar interface and external calendar clients can be controlled using appointment type Customizing (transaction osc1).
Appointment Rules
Appointment rules are components of periodic appointments. Application developers can find more information in the documentation on function groups and function modules for the function group SSC_RULES.
Participants
Participants can be (but do not have to be) assigned to appointments. Participants can be SAP users, shared distribution lists, or BOR object instances. Each participant can have other optional attributes, such as address, role, or attendance status.
All-Day Event
An all-day event can be defined as a main activity for a time period. An all-day event does not reserve a time period and is, therefore, not considered as an appointment in the search for free times. All-day events are displayed in the calendar interface above the time intervals for a day.
Appointment Calendar
An appointment calendar is a set of appointments that are assigned to a participant.
SAP appointment management provides interfaces that integrate the user interface of an appointment calendar into your application. Appointments can be processed from the user interface. All the appointments for a participant are displayed, regardless of which application created them.
For information on the appointment calendar user interface, which can be integrated in other applications, see the documentation Displaying Appointments in SAP Applications (BC-SRV-GBT).
For information on the appointment calendar as an independent example application, see the documentation on the Appointment Calendar (BC-SRV-GBT).
Object Relationship
The object relationship service is used in address management to link application objects, for example, sales activities (SD) or events (TEM), to appointment objects. The prerequisite is that the application object exists as a BOR object. The GUIDs of appointments and application objects are then linked. The roles and role relationships used in this process are generic, although internal appointment management default values exist. If the applications' own roles and role relationships are to be used, these have to be maintained beforehand in transaction sm34 (Viewcluster VRBINRELATION). It must be noted that for every newly-defined application role, an additional role relationship must be defined between this role and the appointment role 'APPOINTMNT'. The purpose of these links is to enable the linked objects to identify each other at any time.
From the appointment calendar, the application within the exit function module, in which it has full control, can identify its object that is linked with the appointment from the object relationship service interface.
If the appointment interface is called from the application, this application will generally select the appointments that are linked with the application object beforehand from the appointment interface, in order to be able to address them specifically.
External Calendar Client
In addition to the SAP interface of the appointment calendar, external programs, such as Microsoft Outlook or a Web browser, also have access to appointment data using RFC calls from the external API. Different appointment type attributes, for example, non-deletability of appointments of a certain type for external calendars, can be used to control the access of these external programs. These appointment type attributes are maintained in Appointment type Customizing (transaction osc1). For further information on the use of external calendar clients, see The Appointment Calendar in the Internet and