Maintenance of Variants 

Use

When you schedule jobs for executing archiving programs, such as the preprocessing, write, or delete programs, you must specify a variant. The purpose of this variant is to specify the scope of data to be processed and to allow the user to make the necessary settings for data processing.

Features

Relative Time Restrictions

Under Relative Time Restrictions, you can specify selection conditions that are relative to the date for the execution of the write program.

Only Records Older Than: You can determine the upper limit of the time slice. To do this, you specify a time period relative to the current date. The time unit for the time period can be specified in days, weeks, months, quarters, years, posting periods, or fiscal years.

Only Complete: The upper limit can also be rounded down to the end of a time period by selecting another, additional time unit. This means, for example, that only complete months or years can be archived when a date field is selected as a selection characteristic for the time slice. The time slice defined in this way contains the complete time period before the upper limit calculated.

If you have specified a relative time restriction and confirmed it with Enter, the selection condition is displayed in the lower row.

Further Restrictions

Under Further Restrictions, you can specify selection conditions for additional characteristics that you chose under Selection Profile in the data archiving process. For the actual selection of the archiving run, the intersection of the relative time restrictions and absolute time restrictions is taken.

Example

You made the following entries in the variant maintenance (February 2006):

Only Records Older Than	2 Years
Only Complete	Quarters
Calendar Day	≤ 31.12.2003 (this is the automatic display for the selection option)

With this selection, only data from complete quarters and that is older than two years is archived. At the current point in time, everything older than or equal to 31.12.2003 is archived.