Adding Segments to DART
Purpose
The data segments provided with DART define the data that can be extracted with DART.
The provided segments contain data from certain tables from various SAP application components, such as Financial Accounting (FI), Controlling (CO), Sales and Distribution (SD), Material Management (MM), Asset Management (AM), Corporate Finance Management (CFM/TR), Travel Management (TM), and so on.
You may need to allow DART users to extract data from additional tables. For example, your users may need to extract and retain data from user-defined tables in the FI Special Ledgers (FI-SL) component.
To enable DART users to extract data from additional tables that are not related to the data in existing segments, you should create a new data segment.
You also need to create a customer enhancement. More specifically, you must program a function exit to read and extract the appropriate data into the DART extract file.
The function exit provided for the purpose of adding new segments to DART is FTXW0002.
Process Flow
The following diagram summarizes the process of adding segments to DART:
You must first create an ABAP Data Dictionary structure to correspond to the data segment you wish to add to DART. The Data Dictionary structure must contain all the fields you wish to include in the data segment in DART, as in the following illustration.
Follow these rules when creating the dictionary structure:
Include in the structure only character-based fields. Do not use numeric data types . If the field in the source table is numeric, create a corresponding field of a character type in the dictionary structure. (In the Function exit FTXW0002, you must convert any numeric data into character data.)
When naming the dictionary structure fields, use the same name as the names of the fields in the source table. Character based fields, also use the same data element. Use the same field names even when you are including a character field to correspond to a numeric field in the source table. Numeric based fields require a new data element that includes descriptions for reporting.
After defining the appropriate Data Dictionary structure, you must:
Create the new data segment in DART based on the Data Dictionary structure. (You can optionally define its attributes at this point.)
Create and activate the function exit FTXW0002 to read the data from the database and extract it.
You may perform the above two tasks in any order.
The following illustration shows the role of function exit FTXW0002.
To allow the user to extract the data defined by the segment you have just created, enable the Extract customer-defined data sources indicator on the Data file configuration screen.
The user must set the
Extract customer-defined data sources
indicator when extracting the data, to include the additional tables in the extract.