Use

You can use this function to create rules and conditions, based on which archive files are automatically routed to specific areas in the file or storage system. You have two options for defining theses areas: You can enter one or several logical file names that are used to determine one or several directories in the file system into which the archive files are written; you can also enter one or more content repositories to which the archive files are to be routed during the store phase.

Which of these two options you choose depends on whether you are using a file system or a storage system connected through ArchiveLink in your archiving strategy. However, it is also possible for you to specify both a logical file name and a content repository for one archiving session. In this case the specified directory would be used as exchange directory before the storage phase. It is also possible to specify only directories at first and then to extend the rules later by specifying content repositories.

The criteria used in the rules and conditions for both directories and content repositories can be on the level of organizational unit (such as company code) or time-based (such as fiscal year).

Due to legal compliance issues, companies, especially those with international locations, are increasingly forced to keep archived data separately in order to comply with different retention requirements for different kinds of data, lines of business or countries, for example. Compared to the manual selection of content repositories or the use of a standard directory such as ARCHIVE_GLOBAL_PATH, Archive Routing offers companies more flexibility and automation options for this purpose. Before archive routing it was only possible to specify one content repository per archiving object.

Integration

Customizing

The routing rules and conditions are entered for individual archiving objects in Archive Routing. The function is available under Archiving-Object-Specific Customizing in Archive Administration (transaction SARA). If no rules have been entered, the directory or content repository are selected the traditional way. See Define Logical Path and File Names and File Storage to Storage System .

Archiving Process

The system checks the rules during the write phase. If you are also storing your archive files, then the system checks the rules again during the store phase. It is important to note that Archive Routing does not use the actual contents of the archive file to determine the directory or content repository, but the selection criteria entered in the variant for the write session. Thus, the set of data covered by the selection criteria in the variant does not have to be exactly the same as the set of data covered by the routing rules and conditions - rather the variant selection must fall inside the latter. If this is not the case, the archiving session is terminated. If it is the case, the archiving session is carried out and the archive files are routed to the appropriate directory or content repository.

Features

For each archiving object you can create rules in Customizing that determine which directory or content repository is to be chosen based on the selection criteria of the write program variant. For each rule you enter conditions, which contain a selection criterion and a corresponding value or interval. It is possible to create one or more rules per archiving object and one or more conditions per rule. The complexity of the rules depends on how specific your criteria for separating your archived data into different directories or content repositories is.

The smallest unit for which a directory or content repository can be determined using Archive Routing is an archiving session. This means that the individual archive files, and therefore all the data objects (documents) in an archiving session are routed to one and the same directory or content repository. If you want to route data to different directories or content repositories, you must start a separate session for each directory or content repository.

Example

You enter the following rules and conditions for archiving object SD_VBAK:

These rules are checked during the write phase of the SD_VBAK archiving session. If the selection criteria of the write variant “match” the values entered in the rules and conditions, as described above, then the data is routed to the appropriate content repository during the storage phase. If not, the archiving session is terminated already during the write phase. In this example, no logical file name was specified, meaning that before the storage phase the data is written to the previously defined standard exchange directory (determined for example through ARCHIVE_GLOBAL_PATH).