How to unprotect a variant
Quite often, program variants are protected to avoid any unauthorised users from changing them.
For example, if this variant is for a program which is part of a batch plan, you don’t want to this variant to be modified as it will disturb your automatic processes. So you protect your variants. But a protected variant can only been changed by the user who has protected this variant.
The issue could arise when the original user has left the company or the variant is required to be changed for an urgent issue?
The solution – Go to transaction SE38, execute program RSVARENT, “Cancel Variant Protection” enter the program and the variant you want to unprotect and execute. The program variant is now available for any changes.
Submitted by Robin Ferali – Thank you for contributing to the webs largest database of SAP tricks!
Background Job Variants
You may know how to check the parameter values of a variant in SM37 by checking the variant name associated with the program being executed. But what do you do if the variant was created ad-hoc and has not been saved. That is it was a temporary variant with a name similar to SAP&0001.
You can see the values used in temporary variants by doing the following:
From the job overview within SM37:
- Select the Job that was run/is running.
- Select the “Step” button (Ctrl+Shift+F9)
- Select the program name.
- Then select the menu path Goto–>Variant
Also – A tip is changing the defaulted Job Overview screen Layout to add the “Executing server” to the display. Do this from within the Job Overview of SM37 by selecting (Ctrl+F7).
SM12 – Lock Entries Tips
If you check SM12 you may find some lock entries – this is not a problem. Locked entries are required in standard SAP processing. In most instances the entry will remain in SM12 for a few seconds milliseconds, however they could remain in SM12 for a lot longer depending on the logical unit of work.
Factors which can impact the entry in SM12:
- Sizing and performance of the enqueue server.
- Sizing and performance of the application server/number of available processing sessions. (indirectly related)
- Program logic being executed on the application server.
What you may not know is that there is a hidden menu path for SM12 analysis. To activate this menu path you can do the following:
Run SM12, then enter OK code “test”. You will now see the top menu path has included a new Menu Option labelled “Error Handling”.
This menu option has many parameters and test functions which you can use to analyse the enqueue and dequeue processes.
If you require advice on how to use this new functionality you can refer to OSS note 5424 which is the SM12 FAQ! Success!
Check Background Jobs
How do I check all background jobs running at a particular time frame? Read more 
SAP Tips – IDocs – Parallel Processing versus Packet Size
What is best to use for system performance?
It is not a cut and dry answer – both methods are valid and have their strengths and weaknesses. The following will help: Read more
SAP Tips – IDoc Commit and Packet Size
Program – RBDAPP01
Use - Inbound processing of IDocs
Tip - Packet Size – (Field- EDP13-PCKSIZ) Read more
SAP Tips – Work Process Types
Checking SM66 or SM50, the following process types are used:
- DIA – Work process for executing dialog steps in user transactions
- UPD – Update process for executing update requests
- ENQ – Process for executing enqueue requests
- BTC – Process for executing batch requests
- SPO – Process for executing spool requests
- UP2 – Process for executing V2 update requests
SAP Tips – Availability Check Default Settings and EDI
In the default settings for the availability check (V_TVTA_VFP-REVFP) should you use options: Read more
