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Migrate those C4C Business Roles

Bianca Koene, 14 December 2016

Everyone that has ever worked with business roles in C4C knows how time consuming it can be to create business roles, especially if they have many access restrictions on business fields and extension fields. For that reason SAP offers the possibility to migrate business roles via standard migration templates. For some time already I tried to figure out how that would work exactly and I found it not so straight forward. Recently I have figured it out and would like to share the procedure here with you.

Preparing the migration templates

It all starts with preparing the migration templates, that you can download from the Business Configuration area. I found the templates for business roles not always so much self-explanatory. So therefor I will share my findings of filling in the template here.

First of all I found that you can only successfully import the business role if you have entered a value in the ERP/ CRM indicator on the ‘general’ tab of the migration templates. You have only two values, either ERP (1) or CRM (0). Even if you are importing the business roles via migration templates, without any link to a CRM On Premise system or ERP system, this is still a mandatory field. So instead of entering a 0 or 1, I entered an X. That works. When executing the migration you then need to make sure to choose the communication with SAP Business Suite (even though in reality there is no communication). But without this information, the import simulation will throw an error.

On the second tab of the migration template you enter the information about the Work Centers you want this business role to give access to. Entering the exact Work Center IDs and Work Center View IDs is all very straightforward. No issues with that. The difficulty is when you want to restrict Read Access and Write Access. I found that restricting the access in the migration templates will make you run into errors later on when you want to process the business role from the business role staging area. I believe there is actually still a bug here for SAP to solve. I would advise to set everything on unrestricted access (5) and after the creation of the business role manually correct the restrictions.

For the Business Field Restrictions tab and Business Action Restriction tab in the migration template, everything works very straightforward as well. No issues here.

Then the Extension Field Restriction Tab. I personally found it very confusing, the kind of information you need to enter here. It is not just a matter of entering the extension field names (UI Text). No, you need to figure out the ‘Element Proxy Name’ of the extension field. How do you find the ‘Element Proxy Name’? By adding this field via the change of the master layout to your business role layout. Here you can also add the Business Object Node Name.

Importing the Migration Template

Now that you have prepared the migration template, you can upload the template in the migration tool. For this go to Silverlight and to Business Configuration -> Activity List -> Integrate and Extend -> Migration of Business Role. As mentioned earlier, make sure with the upload of the template to change the properties to Migration Mode = Add new records AND Communication with External System = Communication with SAP Business Suite. Then execute the migration of the business role.

Business Roles Staging Area

So what happens when the migration of the business role is executed successfully? You won’t find the business role under the active business roles in Application and User Management just yet. You have to go to (Beta) Administration -> Operations -> Business Role Staging Area first.

Here you will find your migrated business role, which is not yet active. There is a few actions you can do from this business role staging area, like making adjustments to your business role, reading the application log in case there were errors in the migration and finally schedule the actual import of the business role in Application and User Management. For that just hit the button schedule. If everything goes well, the business role is now added to the active business roles in Application and User Management. In case of issues, there is a very clear application log that tells you what is wrong with the migrated business role. In that case it mostly means you have to adjust your migration templates and do the migration again until there are no more errors.