Best practice for backing up and restoring forms

[Former Member]

Greetings, I would like to pose a question to the forum and understand how many of you, if at all, "backup" your interactive forms so that in the event one or multple become corrupt, you have a method to recover the forms.

We recently experienced such a scenario in which the forms we developed in ABAP, and access through our portal, had become corrupt. What would happen to us when we attempted to access the form via the portal would be a SOAP error. SOAP errors, I understand, can happen for various reasons but prior to the incident, our forms were working just fine. We attempted to retrace our steps to identify the cause of the problem but found we could not replicate the issue. Through analysis of the forms, we identified the corruption in the master page and found that if we copied the sections of the form that were not corrupt to a new master page, the form would work properly again. Our thought is that this can not be the only method to recover from an incident like this and would like to know if others have experienced or have practices in place that would minimize the impact.

We asked SAP support whether or not there was a method to back up Interactive forms and the simple answer we received was to download the XML file from txn SFP. Can others relate to this strategy as a proper "backup" method or do other best practices exist that would be more ideal??

Thank you in advance!

[OttoGold]

I had many difficulties with this kind of errors like 2 years ago. Of course it was getting better with every patch level, and with LCD 8, LCD 8.1 etc.I don´t have any problems with the newest solution, but remember the feelings. I had to throw away a three days work once because of this "errors". But the solution is easy:

- use the versioning like you do in your ABAP development, that works ok

- if you would like to have an extra backup, copy the form into a backup, I mean with name like Z_YOURNAME_BCK_1

- if you still feel that is not enough, you can always set your forms to be dynamic, what makes the ADS webservice to change the way the forms are constructed (now it will have a internal structure, you can check this out, if you open a dynamic form in LCD outside SAP, it works like a charm, if you open just a printform, it asks for an import, which does not have anything in common with the template earlier). And you can backup every form you generate with these settings. If a problem appears, you can always open this outside SAP in LCD, copy the hierarchy and paste it into your SAP window with LCD development.

Hope that helps.

Regards Otto