Error opening .PLT files from SAP - SAP 7.3 Patch 3

[Former Member]

Greetings.

We are running a SAP system via a 3rd party.  Long story short: we bought the company from another company that is running another company's SAP system.  We are in the process of spinning up our own SAP system that should go live sometime next year.  We loaded this 3rd party's SAP client and loaded something called Webplotter to view .PLT files from SAP.    We loaded it on a few computers at corporate on Windows XP and when you double-click on the PLT file within SAP, nothing happens.  Then we tried Windows 7.  It tells me no programs are associated with .PLT files.  However, I can go over to Windows Explorer, double-click on a PLT file and it opens just file.  I've tried this process on no less than 4 computers: 2 with XP, 2 with Windows 7.  I can go into C:\SAPDOCS and the PLT file is downloaded there and I can double-click on it and open it from Windows explorer.

I went back to the 3rd party's helpdesk and they are completely baffled by this.  I've picked through the registry, burned a few incenses and consulted the oracle (Google), but alas, nothing has helped.

Ideas?

Thanks.

[christoph_hopf · Accepted solution]

Hi Adam,

if you are talking about SAP DMS and you are using so called document info records, please check the customizing in transaction DC30. Here you should see a list of all available workstation applications.

For further advise maybe you can provide some screenshots which might help us to narrow down the reason for your reported issue.

Best regards,
Christoph

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I'm afraid screenshots wouldn't be too exciting or helpful in this case...it was just an error saying that that Windows couldn't determine the helper program for .PLT files.  After running traces with Procmon on a working system and a non-working system, I was able to get my test system working by importing the following keys from the "good system":

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.PLT]

@="PlotFile"

"Content Type"="application/vnd.hp-HPGL"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.plt\OpenWithList]

"a"="iexplore.exe"

"MRUList"="a"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.plt\OpenWithProgids]

"PlotFile"=hex(0):

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.plt\UserChoice]

"Progid"="Applications\\iexplore.exe"

This seems like a clumsy fix/hack and I'm looking at SAP for being the bad guy.  Why doesn't it understand/look at definitions for .PLT in HKCR?  If I can open a .PLT from Windows Explorer, SAP should be able to do the same.  Thankfully, we won't be putting .PLT files in our new SAP implementation, so hopefully I never have to deal with this problem again.

Thanks.