Date profile- How to create one?

It is very important in any transaction in SAP CRM to have a date profile. Amongst other reason, it is what decides the validity of a transaction.In this document, I will try to explain step by step the necessary action that needs to be taken to set up a simple date profile. Lets take an example to understand this feature.Lets assume that a service request needs to be assigned to an employee within 1 hour of creation of the request.So, the “date/time of assignment=  start date +1hour”.

Note: A lot of standard date profile s are already present but in some situation one may need to create a new one.

We need to create the rule based on our requirement. Let us first split out requirement into two halves.

First half is start date, which is nothing but the current time (todays date and time) and the second half is “1 hour”. We get our result by adding these two variables.

Let us go to the following spro path

Now create a new entry (say, ZTEST_RULE)  and enter some  description (say,  DEMO RULE)

Save the entry and double click on the newly created rule.The current version of the rule is displayed. Double click again on the version to open the xml editor.

Here in this code if you look , we have defined our requirement in a simple formula

RESULT=SRV_CUST_BEG + ZCONSTANT , where SRV_CUST_BEG is nothing but a standard date type which denotes start time.To view this search for SRV_CUST_BEG in date types.

ZCONSTANT is a custom defined duration. (Again click on new entry to create a new duration type with meaningful description)

Now the since our rule is built, it needs to be associated with a date profile. To create a date profile again follow the spro path described below.

Click on new entry to create a date profile with meaningful description.

Enter the reference object as SYSTEM. Details about reference object can be found at

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm700_ehp02/helpdata/en/1f/ca0b8a74c9466abef68d8e353f16bd/frameset.htm

Now, search for the newly created date rule. (ZTEST_RULE in this case)

Now enter all the date types  used in our case by clicking on new entry button.

Now enter the duration type as shown below.

Our date rule is built now on lines of our requirement.All we need to do now is to insert this date profile to our desired transaction type.