Variant Maintenance for Archiving Jobs

When you schedule jobs for the execution of archiving programs, such as the preprocessing, write or delete programs, you must enter a variant. The purpose of this variant is to define which data is to be processed and to allow the user to make other settings that are necessary for the processing of the data.

These variant settings can be made when you are scheduling jobs, using the Maintain function.

Variant maintenance is always dependent on the corresponding archiving object. Therefore, the variants may vary considerably depending on the archiving object. These differences, however, occur mainly in the section of the variant maintenance, in which the data selection takes place. For more information about the variant maintenance for a specific archiving object, see the corresponding documentation for the archiving object in the SAP Library.

The rest of the variant maintenance is the same for most archiving objects. The following settings are possible (depending on the type of program to be scheduled: write, delete, and so on).

Under Process Control, you determine whether the process is to run in the test or production mode.

• Test Mode

  In the test mode, the program is only simulated. Depending on the program, either no archiving files are written, or no data is deleted from the database.

• Productive Mode

  In this mode the data is physically processed, according to your selection criteria and, if applicable, additional archiving-object-specific criteria. For example, during the delete phase data is actually removed from the database by the delete program.

Additional settings you can make in the variant maintenance function:

• Detailed Log

  In this field you can decide whether a detailed log ( Complete option) is to be generated in addition to the summarized log during the execution of the program. The summarized log contains each message only once. For each message the number of affected objects is listed as well as an example of an object.

  The detailed log contains all processed objects including the corresponding messages. If you choose Without Success Messages, no success messages are written to the detailed log.

  Recommendation

  Detailed logs should only be generated if you are processing a small number of objects, or, for example, in the test mode. Otherwise the program may terminate, due to a memory overflow.

• Log Output

  Here you can determine, whether the log should be output into the List (spool for background programs), to the application log, or to both.

  The advantage of the application log output is that the log messages are displayed during the program runtime. (With background programs this occurs every 30 minutes and with dialog programs, every 10 seconds). Logs that were output to the list can only be viewed after the program has finished.

  With the list output you have the option to automatically store the log in a storage system (see Spool Parameters under job scheduling). Logs that were written to the application log can only be stored manually from within the display view. Moreover, logs that were output to the list, are automatically removed when the corresponding background job is deleted. Logs written to the application log must be deleted manually.

  All logs can be displayed from within Archive Administration by choosing  Goto  Logs . For more information, see Logs.

• Comment on Archiving Session

  Here you can enter a short text that helps you identify and better find the archiving session in Archive Administration.

See also:

Logs