Follow-up transactions not visible in CRM Web UI

[ajithkumar_krishnakumar]

One of the puzzling issues I faced recently was when one of the custom service order quotation (transaction) types that I created failed to come up in the follow-up transaction list when the 'Follow-up' button was clicked from an Interaction Log in CRM Web UI.

Ok, I did my due diligence :

- checking the transaction type configuration

- checking the copy control config

     (FYI - there is no need of setting up the copy control config. This is a standard feature available based on the underlying business objects. Unless you want to play around with a lot more customizing, you wouldn't have to worry about copy control)

- checked the channel enabling and ensured the right channels are allowed for creating of the service order quotation

No luck.

Next step - our dear SDN forums. I did find several forums mentioning some copy control activities, channel set-up etc. But no sir! I had already checked these. I didn't find anything new. 

What disturbed me the most was that I could find it appearing on the follow-up transaction open in SAP GUI (through transaction CRMD_ORDER) but the same wasn't appearing in Web UI. Not surprising considering all the differences that I had experienced over the past years with the CRM Web UI.

What next?

The panacea to all mysteries in SAP - debug the standard code to find out what is going on. Years have passed since I started off with SAP, but my motto remains the same  - "If it can be debugged, it can be solved!" . Period. :cool:

• Identified the right component and view to place the breakpoint in.
• Backtraced to the point where the validations were happening against the follow-up transactions. {Yes, my excitement was building as I was about to find out why my dear transaction type was not listed in the follow-up}
• For those of you interested in debugging the right place, the class and method is CL_CRM_UIU_BT_GET_PROCTYPES --> GET_FOLLOWUP_CUST ( followed by IS_QUOTATION for quotation specific scenarios)
• There is a logic placed within the code where it validates all the item categories assigned to the transaction types and filters out those transactions in which there are mixed item types.
• :???: Now that was something I forgot to validate. Blame my ignorance! I had not validated the item categories assigned to the custom quotation type. My business requirement wanted some special config in the item categories. Hence I had forgot to set some properties within them. These properties (mainly those which indicate that the item category is quotation relevant as well as copy relevant) determine whether the quotation transaction is 'pure' or 'mixed'. And the standard allows only the pure ones. It removes the 'mixed' type from the standard list for follow up transactions.

• I went back and adjusted the item categories with the above properties (after ensuring that they do not disturb my business requirements of course).
• Problem solved! The custom transaction type now appears on the follow-up list in the CRM Web UI.

That great feeling you get when you manage to resolve an un-explainable issue! There is no stopping an SAP consultant if he understands business, knows the configuration, and to top-it all, knows debugging to understand how the standard behaves! :smile:

Hope this would give pointers to others resolve similar follow-up transaction issues.