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PBF Comments Documentation

bill_ignelzi
Explorer
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Hello,

My employer has recently begun implementation of Public Budget Formulation (PBF). We're looking for technical documentation on PBF Comments. Such information on how and where they're stored, etc. The standard PBF documentation is not particularly helpful with this.

Can you help me find some information on this? Any help getting us started will do even if it's in the form of hand written notes. I am trying to avoid reverse engineering this.

We are seeking information on comments for at least two reasons:

1. Users will need to enter budgets and their associated comments in Excel so we'll need a way to write back comments from Excel to the various delivered comments tables, and

2. We will need to provide a facility (maybe using Business Objects universes?) to consolidate PBF characteristics, key figures and comments on reports.

Thanks in advance for your help,

Bill I.

1 REPLY 1

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Hi Bill,

Within PBF, the actual comment data is stored in the /PBFBI/CMT_INST and /PBFBI/CMT_TEXT tables.  /PBFBI/CMT_INST stores the following information for each comment instance:

  • The comment's unique ID
  • The comment's type (comment type)
  • The form instance with which the comment is associated
  • The comment's sequential order (INST_NUM)
  • The unique ID of the comment's parent comment (only used if the comment is a part of a comment tree)
  • The comment's short text

The /PBFBI/CMT_TEXT table stores the long text (the actual comment). 

As already mentioned, each comment has a comment type (e.g. Description, Justification, Mission).  These comment types are usually created by the administrator or budget form designer and are stored in the /PBFBI/CMT_TYPE table.  The CMT_TYPE_ID uniquely identifies a comment type and maps to the comment type field in the /PBFBI/CMT_INST table. 

With all this said, PBF ships with a handful of standard RFCs that allow you to read and write comments without having to understand the underlying database tables.  You can use /PBFBI/GET_INSTANCE to read a single comment based on a unique form instance ID and comment type. 

/PBFBI/GET_INSTANCE_LIST can be used to access a list of comments based on a unique form instance.  For example, if we assume that the unique ID for the Justification comment type is 1 then we can access all of the Justification comments for the form instance 123 by calling this RFC as follows:

CALL FUNCTION '/PBFBI/GET_INSTANCE_LIST'
  EXPORTING
    FORM_ID             = 123
    LIST_TYPE           = 'TYPE'
    ID                  = 1
  IMPORTING
    CMT_INST_LIST       = lt_result.

Similarly if you wanted to access all comments for a given form instance regardless of their type, you can leave the optional ID and LIST_TYPE parameters blank as follows:

CALL FUNCTION '/PBFBI/GET_INSTANCE_LIST'
  EXPORTING
    FORM_ID             = 123
  IMPORTING
    CMT_INST_LIST       = lt_result.
   

To create or update a comment within PBF you can use any of the following standard RFCs:

/PBFBI/NEW_INSTANCE
/PBFBI/SAVE_INSTANCE - Single update.
/PBFBI/SAVE_INSTANCE_LIST - Bulk update.

I hope this helps. 

Best regards,

Michael