HCM Processes & Forms: FPM Search Help DUMP using wildcards? Yeh, me too!

Ok….this is a short one….just making sure no one else hits this “fun” issue so hopefully I have included enough key words here that people will hit upon when searching.

Scenario

You trigger a standard search help pop-up from some field on your FPM form. In the pop-up, you select the “Search Criteria” option to further filter your “hit list”. In the search criteria field (for example, “work schedule rule”) you enter a value with a “wildcard” (ie. you use “*” or “+”).

Result

You receive a “dump” that states “Error while processing your query”. It might list an exception “type_not_found” or something else.

Correction

The issue is actually in our standard FPM feeder class CL_HRASR00_FPM_FEEDER implementation of interface method IF_FPM_GUIBB_OVS~HANDLE_PHASE_2. You may see code in there for note 1860549 which handles wildcards, but there is a further error. The exception comes in the “describe_by_name” method call that tries to find metadata for the field we entered our search value into to insure it is a character field type (ie. so that it truly allows wildcard searches).

Upon hunting here, there and everywhere, I actually found the correction….but it is incorrectly listed (too specific) as related to “Job search help”. The note actually will fix ANY search helps having this problem. The fix is:

Note 1981790 – Job search help dumps when using wildcard search

So yeh….after first debugging a while to find it….then searching all over for a fix….I stumbled (literally!) into that one. Just glad it is fixed and hope this blog helps others find and resolve it more quickly than I did! haha