Sap Solution Manager 7.2 Guided Procedures

Overview

In the Guided Procedure authoring environment, you can create and maintain custom guided procedures in different contexts and for different application areas.

The Guided Procedure Maintenance tool allows users to maintain custom Guided Procedures.

Where to Start Guided Procedure Maintenance?

To start the Guided Procedure Maintenance, start the Guided Procedure Browser 7.20 first, to see the guided procedures available .

You can go to the Guided Procedure Maintenance UI with three buttons in the Guided Procedure Browser UI:

- - Create: to create a new guided procedure.
  - Edit: to modify a guided procedure
  - Display: to show details of a guided procedure .

Guided Procedure Maintenance comprises different sections.

Guided Procedure Maintenance Sections

The Guided Procedure Maintenance UI contains different sections to maintain guided procedures.

The guided procedure steps in the tree on the left reflect the roadmap displayed when executing guided procedures. On the right side are the step details, including help texts, activities or custom UIs, where you can maintain documentation, add new manual activities or include existing automatic activities, custom UIs or plugins.

The Guided Procedure Maintenance view screenshot below shows these sections

The Header Information contains general information about the current guided procedure:

- - Namespace (SAP or customer)
  - Application area (defines which application can consume/use the guided procedures)
  - Version
  - Who last changed it
  - Last time it was changed

The Action buttons section allows users to perform the following actions on the GP:

- - Toggle between Edit and Read Only modes, to enable or prevent changes to the guided procedure
  - Save changes
  - Check guided procedure consistency
  - Activate
  - Transport
  - Show a preview which runs the Guided Procedure.
  - Properties popup to display general information about the guided procedure, such as its name, short description, version and the package.

The Tree section lists steps and substeps. It contains a subsection, Steps Actions, to perform actions on the steps tree.

- New: add a new step, substep or complete step
- Remove: remove an item
- Move: move up or down a step

A new step can be standard, parent/substep, plugin or complete.

Standard steps can be Automatic, Manual, Custom or Mixed, depending on their activity types.

Automatic steps consist of automatic activities. These activities trigger background activities in Solution Manager, and update the activity status and logs in the guided procedure, when the background activity ends. Automatic activities automate actions which require no additional user input. Examples of automatic activities are the activities in the "System Check for ABAP System" guided procedure that check whether specified alerts for a system were raised in alert inbox. You can create automatic activities and put them in your own guided procedures (you need ABAP OO development knowledge).
Manual steps consist of manual activities. A manual activity is an activity that the user of the guided procedure has to carry out in the managed system or in SAP Solution Manager. It cannot be automated, but you can provide a navigation link to open the transaction, URL or report which performs the manual activity. These activities can consist of a text that describes in detail what is to be done. An example of manual activities are the activities in the "System Check for BW system" guided procedure that describe how to analyze problems in BW, and provide navigation links to monitoring UIs in SAP Solution Manager and in the managed BW system
Custom steps contain a custom Web Dynpro UI to enter data and trigger actions in the SAP Solution Manager system or the managed system. Custom steps can automate some actions which require additional user input. You can create custom steps and put them in your own guided procedures. (you need ABAP OO and Web Dynpro development knowledge).
Mixed steps are combinations of the step types above.

You can group a number of steps under a parent step as its substeps.
When executing the GP, the parent step contains a table of its substeps with the following information: status, description, managed objects, person responsible, last changed on/by.

For more details about implementing custom activities/webdynpro components, see this page.

Plugin stepscontain Plugins, which are reusable steps delivered by SAP. Plugins consist of a design time UI and a runtime UI. The design time UI is shown when you edit the guided procedure to configure the behavior of the plugin when it is executed. The runtime UI allows you to enter some data and trigger actions, when the guided procedure is executed.
For plugins, see the GPA plugins section of this document.

The Complete step is the last step in the guided procedure, which provides an overview over the execution status of the previous steps, so that the processor of the guided procedure can check whether all required activities have been performed. It can also generate an html report containing the documentation, status and logs of all activities in the guided procedure. The processor can add a comment summarizing the overall execution status of the guided procedure. The comment in the Complete step will be displayed in the Guided Procedure log.

To see how to create a new step, refer to the document Guided Procedure 7.20 Build_Run examples.

The Steps section shows general step information, such as its title and description, and allows users to see more properties using the "properties" button.

Step help text is a help text section that gives some technical details of the step.

Reuse step by Ref/Copy:

Starting with Solman Setup 7.2 SP5, you can create steps and sub-steps by referencing existing ones within the same application area.

The Activities section consists of three tabs :

Automatic Activities
Manual Activities
Custom UI

This section allows the user to create activities, reuse existing ones, reuse plugin activities (for automatic activities), and embed existing custom UIs.

The Activity help text allows the user to create his own documentation of the activity, or reuse existing documents of type SE61, and embed PDF and links to PDF file for customers system.

Guided Procedure Maintenance Features

Transport management

Use case

If an issue occurs in a production system, users should inform the development system administration, which creates a transport request and a new guided procedure (with a step note and an automatic step), activates it and releases the transport request. The end user imports the transport request into his production system, and executes the guided procedure to fix the issue.

After the guided procedure has been activated, you can release the transport request and transport into the production system to be executed by end users.

If you specify in the transport settings that the GP is for a production system, it is put into the workbench branch of the route you specified (the package's route).

In this case, the transport request can be sent to the production system automatically. Otherwise, in the case of a transport of copies, the transport will remain on the system, and must be imported into the production system manually, using the transaction STMS.

You can use an existing transport or create a new one, but a transport request can only contains one GP, so any existing transport request must not already contain a GP.

Versioning

As of Solution Manager 7.1 SP10, a guided procedure versioning concept ensures that structural changes (new, changed or removed steps and activities) do not affect currently guided procedure instances. When you create a new guided procedure it is in status inactive and version 1. All changes to the guided procedure are relevant to version 1, until it is activated. If you make changes to an active guided procedure, a new inactive version (current version +1) will be generated automatically . All subsequent changes will be applied to this version of the guided procedure, until it is activated.

The guided procedure browser shows the latest active version of a guided procedure and any inactive version which is currently being developed. Previous active versions of guided procedures are hidden.

If you plan to execute guided procedures in advance, using task scheduling, the generated task schedule will refer to the version of the guided procedure which was active at the time of scheduling. If you create a new active version of the guided procedure later, it will not automatically be referenced in the scheduled tasks, to avoid inconsistencies. If the new version should be executed instead of the old one, create a new task schedule and delete the old one.

GPA plugins

A plugin consists of:

- - A custom UI in Maintenance view to configure the plugin
  - A custom UI at run-time to execute the plugin (for step plugin only)

Plugins are delivered by SAP, and can be reused by customers

There are two types of plugin:

- - Step plugin
  - Activity plugin (only for automatic activities)

Add step plugin

Perform the following steps to add a step plugin:

Select step type Plugin.
Select the plugin.
Read the plugin help documentation, to understand what it does, its prerequisites, and how to customize it.
Configure the plugin.
Create a new step help text.
Save the step.

Design time view

Runtime view

Activity plugin

You can add activity plugin only for automatic activities.

To add an activity plugin, choose the plugin activity from the list, and specify the parameters according to the selected plugin.

GPA HTML Report Customization

The HTML Report customization for a given Guided Procedure let the Guided Procedure owner set the following:

The fields (check boxes) to be visible or not in the HTML report Popup.
The default values for the fields (check boxes) in the HTML report Popup.
A new Style sheet design by setting a new CSS class (A class inheriting fromCL_SISE_REPORT_CSS and affording a new style sheet).

The customization of the HTML report Popup and report is done via the GPA Maintenance Tool when clicking on "Report Configuration" as you see in the screenshot below.

In order to set the customization, you have to be in "Edit" mode.

After setting the customization, you must save the Guided Procedure so that the customization will be saved for this version of the Guided Procedure.

Customization Popup

The customization Popup is mainly a reuse of the HTML Report generation Popup, it have furthermore a visibility column for each field (check box) in the Popup and an input field for the CSS class name.

The customization Popup is described in the screenshot below.

The fields corresponding to the default values of the HTML report Popup are enabled/disabled according to its visibility fields in the right column.

The reset button is used to reset all the values in the popup to the default values even if there is an already saved customization.

Customization features

In this part, more details about the customizing feature are presented with examples.

Visibility of HTML Report Configuration

All the configuration of the HTML Report (Include documents, include logs, ...) could be set to visible or hidden according to the customization set by the Guided Procedure owner.

A field like "Include documents" could be checked and hidden at the same time. In this case, the documentation will be included in all the report without having the choice in the HTML Report generation Popup.

In the example below, the customization popup, the generation popup and the report content will be shown to explain more how it works.

Customization Popup	Generation Popup	HTML Report Content

In the example described in the previous table, the logs part in the HTML Report Popup is set as not visible.

The statistics check box is only visible from GPA Logbook application, that's why we don't see it in this generation popup.

Values of HTML Report Configuration

Not only visibility of check boxes is customized, but also the default values that are displayed in the HTML report generation Popup.

In the example below, we'll show an example of how it works.

Customization Popup	Generation Popup	HTML Report Content

In the example described in the previous table, the report is set as Anonymized, and "Anonymized Report" is not visible; We want to force the report to be anonymized.

The statistics check box is only visible from GPA Logbook application, that's why we don't see it in this generation popup.

Enhance graphic Generation:

Starting from SP6, it is now possible to attach one or several charts to any kind of Guided Procedure activity. Graphics was enhanced to support all possible chart types (SAP VizFrame): bubble, heatmap, scatter...

Multiple graphics per activity are also supported.

Create a new CSS style sheet for the HTML Report:

Description

The HTML report style could be changed for a given Guided Procedure. The procedure to do so is simple.

The current CSS Style sheet is provided to the HTML report via the classCL_SISE_REPORT_CSS in the methodGET_CSS_STYLE_SHEET( ) as a string.

The CSS structure is composed into CSS classes that have meaningful names so that it's easy to recognize each part of the report structure.

How to change the CSS Style of the HTML Report?

Create a class that inherits fromCL_SISE_REPORT_CSS.
Redefine the methodGET_CSS_STYLE_SHEET( ) in the created class:

Return the new CSS style sheet as a string.
Check that the method compiles.

Activate the class.
Go to the GPA Maintenance Tool.

Click on "Report Configuration"
The customization Popup will show up, write your class name in the appropriate input field.
You can use F4 Help to show all the sub classes ofCL_SISE_REPORT_CSS that don't have errors.
Click on "OK" and save the Guided Procedure.

The table below describes the exact CSS properties and its place in the HTML Report structure (the default CSS properties are not shown, but they are important for the styling of the report):

CSS Property name	Description
GP
gpname	The Guided Procedure name
gp_status	The Guided procedure status
gp_instances_table	The Guided Procedure instances table
printLink	The print link
print_link_container	The container of the print link
gp_stats_table	The Guided Procedure statistics table
gp_summary_table	The Guided Procedure summary table
gp_summary_sub_parent_step_desc	The Step description for sub steps and parent steps in the Guided Procedure summary table
gp_summary_substep_desc	The Step description for sub-steps in the Guided Procedure summary table
gp_summary_parentstep_desc	The Step description for parent step in the Guided Procedure summary table
gp_summary_step_icon	The Step icon in the Guided Procedure summary table
gp_summary_step_desc	The Step description in the Guided Procedure summary table
gp_summary_last_changed_by	The column last changed by in the Guided Procedure summary table
gp_summary_last_changed_on	The column last changed on in the Guided Procedure summary table
Step
step_type_container	The container of the Step type
step_icon_container	The container of the Step icon
step_docu_container	The container of the Step documentation
typeStep	The "Type" line in any Step
Activity
activity_table	The Activity table
headerTableActivity	The header of any Activity
activity_name	The Activity name
activity_description	The Activity description
typeActivity	The "Type" row in any Activity table
activity_logs_table	The Activity logs table
logMsgTitle	The Log Messages title
logTableColTechSys	The column Technical System in the log table
logTableColText	The column Long Text in the log table
logTableColDetails	The column Details in the log table
logTableColUrl	The column URL in the log table
Footer&Logo
footer	The footer of the report
confidientiality_note_container	The container of the confidentiality note in bottom of the report
sap_logo_container	The SAP logo container in bottom of the report

Sap Solution Manager 7.2 Guided Procedures

Source: https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/SMSETUP/Guided+Procedure+Maintenance+7.20

Georgina Almou1939