Sharing counters with contract items

SAP Convergent Charging enables you to share a unique counter with several contract items belonging to the same provider contract. This means that one unique counter is created and debited or credited by the charges and the refill logic of several contract items at the same time.

Examples

• When creating a provider contract in SAP CRM, you can share some counters declared in a charge plan or in a refill plan. Consult the configuration documentation of SAP CRM for more information about the product maintenance, the charge plan assignments, and the counter sharing settings.

• When implementing the spending status monitoring feature for policy control, the contract items that activates a monitoring plan must be configured with counters shared with other contract items of the provider contract.

Namespaces

In addition, you can define a namespace for a shared counter. The namespace enables you to use the same counter name from the counter dictionary in different contexts. The pair (counter name, namespace) is unique and is used to identify the shared counter.

Example

A counter called FREE_UNITS can be used in the namespace SMS and in the namespace VOICE. In that case, two different counters with the same name will be created and used separately inside the same provider contract.

See also: Sharing counters with provider contracts

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites must be fulfilled to share a counter:

• In each charge plan or refill plan that will be activated in a provider contract, you must:

• Declare the counter with the same name. Note that you must choose this name in the counter dictionary.

• Set the visibility of the counter to External (*).

• A particular charge plan is dedicated to configuration of the initialization of shared counters

(*) Only in charge plans. The visibility of counters is always external in refill plans.

Sharing a counter

Apply the following procedure. This manual procedure is only for test, demo, or training purposes.

To share a counter inside a provider contract

1. Create or modify the provider contract with which you want to share counters.

2. Check in each charge plan and refill plan activated in the provider contract that the prerequisites are fulfilled.

3. Share the counter in a first contract item by selecting the status Shared Within Contract. In a contract item activating a charge plan, set up the Counters tab. In a contract item activating a refill plan, set up the Counters tab.

4. Share this counter with the required contract items. For example, if you want to be able to monitor this counter as form of a spending status, you can set up a monitoring plan.

Initializing the counter

The procedure to initialize the shared counter consists in creating an additional charge plan which contains a dedicated parameter. This charge plan is then referenced by an item of the provider contract containing the shared counter.

To initialize a shared counter

The procedure consists of the following steps:

1. Create a reusable charge dedicated to initializing the shared counter.

2. Create a charge plan containing this charge.

3. Insert the charge plan in the provider contract.

To create a reusable charge dedicated to initializing the shared counter

1. Create a reusable charge.

2. Add a one-shot rate, a persistent counter, and a parameter to the charge. Note that the parameter enables you to initialize the counter at provider contract level.

3. Set the Event Name to Activation in the Definition tab of the One-Shot Rate component.

4. Add a Counter Operator component to the One-Shot Rate.

5. Set the counter to the value of the parameter in the Counter Operator component (*).

(*) See the online Help of logic components for more information about One-Shot Rates and Counter Operators (help resources).

To create a charge plan containing this charge

1. Create a charge plan.

2. Add the charge to the charge plan.

3. Create the counter to be shared with the visibility option set to External in the charge plan. Do not forget to use the same name as previously.

4. Link the counter to the counter declared in the charge.

5. Define a parameter, and then link the parameter with the visibility External (Mandatory) to the parameter declared in the charge.

Insert the charge plan in the provider contract

1. Create a new contract item referencing the charge plan dedicated to initializing the shared counter.

2. Set the status of the counter to Shared.

3. Specify the same namespace as for the other contract items, if needed.

4. Set the parameter linked to that of the charge to the value needed to initialize the shared counter.