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stefankrauth
Active Participant

Hello,

Sometimes issues are coming up where you cannot update fields on objects that are flagged as writable in the repository viewer. This is often the case, when your solution has been assigned to a deployment unit, which can not write to the business object you're trying to update.

Why does this happen?

When you create a Solution, you're asked to assign it to a deployment unit.

In this case, the deployment unit "Foundation" has been chosen. This leads to the behavior, that all custom business objects created in this solution will be created in the deployment unit "Foundation".

But what happens if you would like to access a business object in another deployment unit? Let try to update the delivery date of the purchase order.

This will lead to an error. But why? According to the repository explorer, write access is allowed!

But the repository viewer also shows another information. The PurchaseOrder got greated in the deployment unit "Purchasing". Due to the logical encapsulation of the ByD units, only read access is allowed cross DU.

How to overcome this limit?

Well, this can be easy or difficult depending on what you're doing.

Option 1: You can "move" the custom business object to the Purchasing deployment unit. Then it will live next to the Purchase Order and has write access. This can be achieved with the annotation [DeploymentUnit(Purchasing)] in front of the business object definition.

Option 2: The more difficult usecase is, when you have one object that needs to write to multiple objects in different deployment units. Then you can't move the business object to one deployment unit without losing write access to the other one. In this case you can create a helper business object in the read only deployment unit and communicate with it using a webservice. This case happens only in very rare cases.

Special deployment unit "Foundation"

The deployment unit "Foundation" is an exception. It is the underlying deployment unit and all other deployment units have write access to the Foundation (but not the other way around!). Therefore it is advisable to create a solution in the deployment unit that matches the purpose of the solution. Creating a solution in the Foundation deployment unit should only be used if you only need write access to master data objects.

I hope this helps you to understand deployment units a bit better.

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