SAP Archiving – SAP AS or Archive Information System For FI_DOCUMNT
Friends, I have already discussed about old archive index ARIX_BKPF. Archive index ARIX_BKPF is replaced by new indexing tool called SAP AS or SAP Information system as of SAP_APPL release 600.
Within Archive Information System, the archive indexes are created in structures called Archive Information Structures or just Infostructures.
Archive Information System can be used to create information structures pertaining to any archiving object. In this post I will discuss SAP AS by taking example of object FI_DOCUMNT.
Which transactions make SAP AS
The new indexing tool for archived data consists of transactions SARI and SARJ. These two transactions combined together makes SAP AS.
Transaction SARJ is used to create/edit information structures which hold necessary information for indexing archived data.
Transaction SARI is used to explore the data present in information structure, for checking status of information structure etc.
Advantages of SAP AS
For me, below are the two most important advantages of SAP AS over old archive index ARIX_BKPF.
1) In my earlier post Why XARCH Flag is Set in Secondary Indexes, I discussed about a limitation because of which line item display transactions cannot display required data if we delete secondary indexes after archiving. Therefore, a flag XARCH is set in secondary indexes. Does that mean we cannot delete archived data from secondary index tables?
Well, if we have active archive info structures in an R/3 system then we can display line items even after deleting the same from secondary index tables. This is made possible because of the flexibility of SAP Archive info structures to store archive index information on per account basis.This was not possible with old archive index ARIX_BKPF which stores index information based on only header of FI document.
Now line item display transaction FBL3N, FBL1N and FBL5N
Can read SAP info structure based on field catalogue SAP_FI_DOC_002.
Get the archive file name and offset information for the document.
And display the line items.
Above procedure was not possible with old archive index ARIX_BKPF because line item display transactions reads items per account and account field was not present in ARIX_BKPF.
For making line item display transaction read from SAP AS, you just need to select ‘SAP Information System’ while executing the transaction. Below is an example of FBL3N.
2) You can view whether SAP AS is fully or partially populated i.e whether index is present for all the archived documents or not. This was not possible with old archive index ARIX_BKPF. Fill status of an info structure, for example SAP_FI_DOC_002, can be viewed via transaction SARI.
Can we use SAP AS in lower releases like 46C, 470 and 500
Yes. SAP AS can be used in these releases but you need to search SAP notes to find out how to activate this functionality in lower releases.
By SAP AS replaced ARIX_BKPF as of SAP_APPL release 600 I meant that ARIX_BKPF will no longer updated and used starting from SAP_APPL release 600. In 600 and above releases, SAP AS must be used.
That’s it for now friends.
Please share your thoughts through comments.
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Related posts:
- SAP Archiving – Why XARCH Flag is Set in Secondary Indexes during Archiving FI Documents
- SAP Archiving – Archive Administration SARA
- SAP Archiving – What Data gets Archived via Object FI_DOCUMNT
- SAP Archiving – Archive Index ARIX_BKPF for Accounting Documents
- SAP Archiving – Filling or Populating data in Information Structures or SAP AS