TimeZones in a Centralized Architecture.

[Former Member]

I know this question has been asked time and again but....

Just a background of our architecture - We are primarily interacting with SAP so all we require is a single (central) server for our scenario. We are on xMII 12.0.1

Even though the application is hosted on a single server but it'll have a multi time zone audience/users.

We are integrated with the Acive Directory.

In SAP the time zones are part of the User Profile and thats what takes care of the issue.

From an xMII perspective , we'll have a single system user (and hence a single TZ) to carry out the connection and the transaction execution in SAP.Because of this it'll give a wrong date/time picture in SAP.

For example.using xMII, if you are creating an Emergency Work Order sitting in EST and your SAP instance & SAP xMII instance is in PST then most probably the sysuser xMII uses to connect SAP has a TZ as PST. In this case the Work Order would be created in PST rather than EST. This might get wrong results when SAP tries to get downtime reports etc.

I am aware that in a distributed environment this can be taken care of by having individual SAP sysusers for each of the local servers and for other kinds we can use the TZ offset in the Virtual servers.

Has anyone come accross this in a centralized environment yet?

It would be wonderful if anyone can share any practical experiences on this.

Regards

Udayan

[salvatore_castro · Accepted solution]

Ud,

This issue is one of the reasons why its a Best Practice to implement xMII is a distributed fashion. Time synchronization will have to be done manually, you can always pass a TimeZone offset value in order to calcualte the correct timestamps but this is a lot of maintenance and overhead.

Sam

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Sam,

I guess you are right.

Probably it would be good idea to add this in the Best Practices guide because all this while the "Centralized Vs. Distributed" comparison never touched this aspect.

You said one can pass the offset - are there any BAPIs that could help doing that?

I checked TIMEZONE in se37 but could not find a remote enabled function. Probably one needs to write a custom one I guess.

All this said , I found that even if somehow you get the TZ for the logged in user there's no way you can tell a BAPI to use it. The Create date time probably default based on the SAP Users Time Zone.

[salvatore_castro · Accepted solution]

Ud,

You are correct in that there isn't a pro/con comparison of the Centralized vs. Decentralized models. We simply say not to use Centralized because you will run into implementation issues.

As for the offset you can make it a Role Attribute and always pass in the value to a dateaddhours( datetime, value) function. However if the BAPI does not have a datetime input than it will not work. But this may not be an issue since all of the data is ERP will than be relative to the timestamp of the ERP system which may not be a big deal. All of the site reports can have their timestamps modified to reflect their location via the dateaddhours(datetime, -value) function. Just something to consider.

Sam