Delta Links and SAP Content
Objects 
Use
SAP objects (roles, worksets, iViews, pages, etc.) are contained:
·
Within the initial
content provided with the portal. To find out what belongs to the initial
content, see 
Standard Initial
Content.
· Within the business packages delivered by SAP that can be imported into the portal from the iViewStudio.
The content objects provided by SAP (the initial content) can be found in the Portal Catalog in the following folder: Portal Content ® Content provided by SAP. Objects in this folder belong to the SAP namespace. The ID of the object contains the prefix:
· com.sap* or
· com.sap.pct*
Do not make any changes to objects in the SAP namespace. If you would do so, you would change an object that is not in your namespace. If an object is modified and a new version of the object is then imported into the portal, you lose all your changes, since they are overwritten.
...
Features
You have two possibilities for reusing objects provided by SAP and adapting them to your needs:
1. Scenario 1: You use the SAP objects that are delivered without a namespace.
2. Scenario 2: You create a delta link from an SAP object.
Activities
Scenario 1: You use the SAP objects that are delivered without a namespace
As described above, the objects of the initial content belonging to the SAP namespace can be found in the Portal Catalog in the following folder: Portal Content ® Content provided by SAP.
You may not use or change these objects.
In parallel there are copies of these objects in two other folders of the Portal Catalog: Portal Content ® Portal Administrators and Portal Content ® Portal Users. These folders contain for example:
· the administrator roles
· the standard user role
· the pre-configured page for the navigation areas in the portal
You can change all the objects in these two folders as needed by placing them in the Portal Content Studio for editing. Since the objects are not in the SAP namespace – the namespace is empty – you can use or change the objects without making modifications.
You can use the objects in the two folders Portal Administrators and Portal Users because they have a delta link relationship to the original objects in folder Content provided by SAP. The initial content is provided by SAP together with the delta link relationships.
Note the following for the administrator roles:
· If you want to change the pre-configured administration roles, always use the administrator roles in the folder Portal Content ® Portal Administrators.
· If you want to assign administrator roles to users, always use the administrator roles in the folder Portal Content ® Portal Administrators.
Scenario 2: You create a delta link from an SAP object
You can derive an object from a SAP object with a delta link. You assign the derived object a name in your own namespace. The fastest way to do this is to copy the SAP object from the Portal Catalog and insert it elsewhere in the Portal Catalog as a delta link. You can find out how to create delta links in this way by reading Creating Delta Links.
In this case a delta link means that you create a reference to a delivered object that is not part of your own namespace (the source object) from an object belonging to your own namespace (the target object).
You can now change "external" contents within your own object. In this case you work on the reference, and not on the original object delivered by SAP. The system records the changes you make (such as deleting folders or adding folders to role hierarchies) as a delta.
Result
In both scenarios the advantage of the delta link method becomes apparent:
· You can make changes to a target object (delta link object) and the source object remains unchanged.
· If the source object is reimported into the portal at a later time with changes to its contents, these changes appear automatically in all the derived target objects.
· When you import the content object again, your changes to the derived (target) object are retained.