Header Data for Incoming Files (SAP Library

Header Data for Incoming Files

You maintain the following information, displayed on the various tabs, for format trees representing incoming data medium exchange (DME) files:

Administrative Data

You can document your format tree as needed. To do so, specify a name for your documentation text in the Documentation field; the name format <format tree ID>_DMEE is recommended. You can then maintain the text directly in the SAPscript editor by choosing This graphic is explained in the accompanying text . For more information on creating your own format documentation, refer to the field help for the Documentation field.

Note

The format documentation is meant to contain general information that is relevant to the entire format. If you want to document details at the node level (such as how an amount is calculated), you can enter up to three lines of comments per node, on the Comment tab (which is visible for all nodes except the header).

The version of the format tree is displayed. The system assigns the fixed value 000 to an active version and 001 to a maintenance version.

File Data

You can also enter your own format-specific characters that you wish to allow in or exclude from the file; enter them one after another, with no spaces between them. If you then select one of the following radio buttons and choose the conversion function Exclude/allow defined characters for the affected elements, the system does the following:

Do Not Allow These Charact. ® The system removes the specified characters from the character string.

Allow Only These Charact. ® The system removes all other characters from the character string except for the ones specified here.

Assignment Rules

Each data record in an incoming file must contain a character string that uniquely identifies the record (called the identifier in the format tree). To model the format of the incoming file, you define a segment for each record and assign each segment a reference ID. Then, in the assignment rules, you assign the reference IDs to the identifiers in the incoming format, which links the records to the corresponding segments and allows the DME Engine to correctly convert the levels of an incoming file. The ID offset identifies the number of characters that come in the string before the identifier.

To illustrate how assignment rules work, refer to the template format tree SAP_EXAMPLE (tree type MCSH):

Assignment Rules for SAP_EXAMPLE

Rule No.	Identifier	ID Offset	Ref.ID of Tgt Segmt
1	HD	0	HEADER
2	BP	0	BUPA
3	PM	3	PAYM
4	VW	0	VWZW
5	TR	0	TRAILER

This format tree models a file format that contains five types of information: header, business partner, payment, note to payee (optional), and trailer. The file marks the beginning of its header with HD and the beginning of its trailer with TR, represented by the reference IDs HEADER and TRAILER. Between these records come business partner records (identified by BP), then payment data (identified by PM starting with the third character of the string), followed by the note-to-payee information (identified by VW).