Well, the customer is opening a new plant and wants a simplified front-end to IW26 (Service Notification Create.) And down in the Forums, I've learned what I need to know to do this front-end in regular ABAP OO - namely, that BAPI_SERVNOT_CREATE and BAPI_SERVNOT_SAVE are the right tools for this job. So, score "2" for SDN for two reasons: 1) pointing me to BAPI_SERVNOT_CREATE instead of its "baby-brother" BAPI_SERVICENOTIFICAT_CREATE; 2) telling me that BAPI_SERVNOT_SAVE is the second piece of this particular BAPI puzzle. Perhpas more importantly, score a googolplex (no, not a "Google-plex") for SDN for all the materials on WDA available at SDN and all the pointers at SDN to WDA materials elsewhere. Because these WDA materials and pointers have been made available at SDN , I will be ready come February 2007 to take on a much more important task than just writing an ABAP OO simplification of the IW26 front-end. In particular, I will be able to write a WDA version of this front-end for the new NW2004s platform that the customer will have in production by February. From materials and pointers available at SDN, I already know how to write the UI and also how to call the BAPIs from this WDA UI. OK - so why is a simplified WDA version of the IW26 front-end so important? Well - not so much because of how it helps the customer on the shop-floors of its plants - the original ABAP OO simplified front-end would do this just as well. Nope - the reason the WDA version is important is because it will demonstrate that WDA has creditability in two respects: a) WDA can be written quickly, even by a relative beginner who is only billing at the rate of an ABAP 2003 certified consultant; b) WDA can run efficiently (response-time-wise and resource-drain-wise.) So - there may still wind up to be a lot of reasons why it will take longer than it should for this customer put WDA into general use as 2007 turns into 2008 and 2008 into 2009 - reasons which I personally can not do anything to counter. But at least I will have been successful in removing two reasons from this stack, by virtue of having been able to demonstrate (a) and (b) above. And that, in a nutshell, is an example of the power of SDN. So best to y'all on the SDN Team, and of course all SDN'ers everywhere (including "Tiny Tim", of course).
