SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII) Business Logic Services includes its own scheduling service that allows you to execute transactions on different schedules.
- The Schedule Editor is used to set up all scheduled jobs.
- The Scheduler is used to view a schedule summary.
Schedulers can be used to perform the functions as defined by SAP but we can also use it to have a variety of other things.
Like when me and my teammate Rupesh were discussing about an MES simulation for a training demo, we were struck with the brilliant idea(;-)) of using scheduler to update the SQL table and display the values in LED. Now the LEDs(of the Grid) will be updated from a SQL table which is updated by a transaction.
What did we do?
- We created a table called stage_info using MySQL for simulating the stage activities. It has two columns:
- o LineID(alphanumeric)
- o Stage_ID (alphanumeric)
- o Stage_status(boolean)
- Another table line_info is created for holding the flag that whether the transaction is to be executed or not.
- o Line_id(alphanemric)
- o RunFlag(Boolean)
Here for the sake of simplicity, I'm using a Boolean value for stage_status(1 for in use and 0 for idle).
- We created a transaction which fulfils the following functionality.
- o First it will check the status of the flag for current line. If it is true then it will execute the rest of the transaction otherwise it will exit it.
- o reads the sql table and check the status of each stage and change the status of next stage and current stage.
- Then a scheduler is set to run for specific time interval and the transaction for this scheduler is set to the transaction that we created earlier.
- We created a columnlights grid with source as the field of the stage_status of stage_info table. Here we set the color context as
- o 1-Green
- o 0-Magenta
The refresh rate of the grid was set to 15 seconds.
What did we achieve
We achieved a grid which was somewhat like this.
The grid automatically changes according to the values in the SQL table. And yippie... we did simulated MES.
This is just a tweak that one can use to simulate some time bound action. I hope this also gives readers the idea to get the things done using schedulers. This is just for prototypes and shoudl not be used on real production environments.
