Processing Article Lists 

Use

You can create, change, copy and display article lists. You group article lists in the article list hierarchy. You can use a report to periodically delete article lists that have expired.

Procedure

Before you can create an article list, you must first create a node in the article list hierarchy.

When you create the article list you assign a name, short description and an access status to it. You decide whether you want to create a dynamic or static article list. In a dialog box you then select the articles to be contained in the article list. You can use different selection criteria to do this. You can also create additional nodes.

The article list hierarchy is displayed in a tree structure on the left-hand side of the Article List Management screen. If you have the necessary authorization, you can change the hierarchy and the assignment of article lists to individual end nodes. When you select an article list, the selection options for the article list are displayed on the upper right-hand side of the screen and the corresponding article numbers are displayed on the lower right-hand side.

A difference is made between processing for dynamic and static article lists:

·        For dynamic article lists, you process mainly selection criteria. You can check how many articles correspond to the selection criteria. You can also display a list of all the selection criteria in a dialog box. The dynamic article list is complete once you have entered a short text for the article list and a validity period.

·        For static article lists, you process the article list short text, the validity period and the selection conditions. At the point of creation, the system uses selection conditions to determine the corresponding article numbers, and saves these to the article list as attributes. You can view the number of assigned articles in a separate field. You can subsequently process the quantity of article numbers without being bound to the selection parameters. You can add or delete individual items.

As well as the additional functions in the dynamic article lists, other functions are also available. You can determine the delta between the assigned articles and the current resulting quantity of the selection parameters, and align the article assignments with the delta. You can also determine the status of articles. The traffic light system is used to indicate different statuses:

·        Red: The article no longer exists

·        Yellow: The article displays the client-wide deletion indicator

·        Green

Article lists are deleted after their validity period expires. You can change the end date of the validity period of an article list online. However, you can only change the start date if the original start date is a date in the future. It is not possible to have a validity start date in the past. Apart from controlling the deletion of article lists, validity is only used for input help display. You can only select an article list if the validity period covers the current date in the system.

The statuses Planned, Released and Released/Not Changeable determine how article lists can be used. An article list with Planned status can only be used by the person who created it. Released article lists can be used by every user, but the Released/Not Changeable status does not necessarily mean that the article list definition will not change again before the validity period expires.

Authorization for processing article list hierarchies is granted at node level. If users have processing authorization for a specific node, they can create, move or delete all the subnodes as they wish. However, it is only possible to delete lower-level nodes if no article lists are assigned to their end nodes, as these would all be deleted at the same time. As with maintenance authorization, the assignment of article lists to end nodes is checked on a node-specific basis.