Procedure

The SAP Object Migration Facility (OMF) is designed to enable the movement of objects from a test or staging environment to a production environment. The process for utilizing the Object Migration Facility requires definition and modification of objects in a test or staging (source) environment followed by creation of an Object Migration Archive (OMA) used to import the objects into the production (target) environment.

The recommended usage of this facility is to complete object definition and implementation on the source system, followed by creation of an archive containing all datasets, which is then imported into the target system. Once this full import is completed, establishing the set of objects common to the source and target systems, partial exports may be created and used to update the target system with changes made to the source system.

Note, however, that the use of partial exports requires careful consideration of the interdependencies between objects. For example, suppose you have defined a new RFx template object in a source system that uses a Unit of Measure that was defined since the time of the full object migration from the source to the target system. Also suppose that you want to migrate the new template from the source to the target system. In this simple case, migration of the template without migration of the new Unit of Measure will fail, since the reference to the Unit of Measure will not be resolved during import of the template.

The solution in this case is to create an export package of both RFx Templates and Units of Measure. When this package is imported, the Units of Measure will be imported prior to the RFx Templates, so that when the template is imported, the reference to the Unit of Measure will be resolved and the import will succeed.

In practice, the previous example represents is an extremely complex problem. Whenever an object is being imported, any object referenced by the object being imported must exist in the target system or the import will fail. Higher-level objects such as templates and document types contain many references to objects which themselves may contain references to other objects. When creating a partial export, it is suggested that the creator consult the Reference Guide to determine the potential set of objects which may need to be included in the export package.

Implementation Note

One object relationship which is encoded in the system but not reflected in the reference guide is a relationship between the Extension Definition and Dynamic Class Metadata classes of objects. If either of these object classes is added to an export package, both object classes must be added.