CKIS is an "treed" SAP table (i.e. a table with "treed" rows) because the immediate children of row X are those rows in which the kalnr is equal to the ukaln of row X. Of course, the entire table is not one big tree because there are many "root" rows in CKIS in which the kalnr is the ukaln in no other row, thereby implying that CKIS is an unordered forest of unordered trees from a graph-theoretic point of view. So for the purposes of this blog, we restrict attention to one of the many trees in CKIS, i.e. one of the many trees whose "root" is a row in which the kalnr is the ukaln of no other row. There are many quantities that are often computed from CKIS rows, e.g. for a given row, we can compute a material scrap cost using various values in a row of CKIS. But according to some business experts in these matters, such computations must sometimes be "normalized" relative to a chosen lot size (menge). To do this, we first take the ratio of a "root" row's menge to the chosen menge and adjust the quantities of all the children of this row by this ratio, including the menge of each of these children. Then when we proceed the next level of the tree (the grand-children of the original root), we normalize each of these menge's relative to the adjusted menge's of their parents - the ones we adjusted in the the original step. Then, when we proceed to the next level of the tree (the great-grandchildren of the original root), we normalize each of these menge's relative to the adjusted menge's of their parents - the ones we adjusted in the second step. And so forth and so on in a cascade down the tree. Since there are probably dozens of treed tables in SAP on which such cascading recomputations must be performed for business purposes, one would think that someone would have come up with a generic widget to perform this useful service. But I've looked for a such a widget in SAP-delivered code and haven't found one. Not have I seen any such widget presented in any blog or forum post at SDN. And I can't for the life of me figure out why a company built around doing top-notch business data-processing wouldn't already have a widget to deliver such a useful and oft-needed business data-processing service. Nor can I figure out why some SDNer anxious to obtain code-sample points hasn't yet presented such a useful widget here at SDN. Surely a truly generic widget capable of performing a cascading recomputation on any set of quantities in any treed table would constitute a very respectable candidate for a submittable SDN code-sample. But nope - there's just no widget that performs this service to be found at SDN. So I guess each SAP developer will just have to program this widget each time he or she needs it, or at least program it once and clone it each time a different flavor of it is needed for a different cascading computation on a different table. Oh, wait a second. Did you think I was going to present such a widget here? If so, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Maybe when business data-processing comes back into fashion ... if I'm still alive. But right now, "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that bling."
