Setting up rules for offline data distribution

The new SAP Cloud for Customer Extended Edition applications (iOS, Android and Windows) give you granular control over the data that is downloaded to a user’s device for offline usage.

As a key user, you can configure the rules for this. These rules can be company-wide (valid for all roles) or for specific-roles (Sales Rep, Field Service Agent etc.)

Rules are basically queries which select a set of data that is relevant for the user.

In Cloud for Customer, we have a concept of queries, like ‘My Accounts’, ‘My Open Visits’ etc. – the same concept is relevant for offline data distribution as well.

This means that the same queries you are used to working with online, can now be used by the synchronization engine to bring data offline.

This simple solution provides powerful capabilities:

1. Different rules can be setup to bring down different data sets for different user roles (e.g. My Accounts for a Sales Rep, My Team’s Account for a Sales Manager)

2. As a key user, you can create queries for all users which are available to them online when they are viewing a list of objects.

3. These same custom queries can then be reused as custom rules which determine what data is downloaded and stored for offline usage!

As a key user, you can maintain these rules under Administrator > Offline Settings.

To get started, you can quickly define rules that are valid for all business roles (common business data valid for everyone in your organization):

and rules that are valid for specific business roles:

A few points to keep in mind:

1. The data downloaded for a user is a union of the data brought down by rules valid for all business roles and her specific business role.

2. The maximum limit for each object is 5000 entries – in case the limit is reached during download, the last modified (5000) entries would be downloaded

3. The data brought down by these rules is called ‘Primary’ data.

4. In certain cases, we bring down related data for objects being downloaded automatically with them – e.g. The Account of a Visit (or Task or Ticket) would be downloaded automatically even if no rule was set up for bringing down Accounts specifically.

This data is called ‘secondary’ data as it is not brought down by the rules configured directly but as a dependency of those rules. SAP has pre-configured logic for this in the system.

5. ‘Secondary’ data download can bring down entries over and above the 5000 entries maximum limit. For e.g. imagine that case when the admin has setup a rule to download ‘My Contacts’ which has more than 5000 entries. Here the primary data download will be restricted at 5000. However, if the admin also configured a rule for ‘All Accounts’ – during the download of of each Account, the sync will figure out the related contacts of the account and download them as well. These contact entries will be downloaded even if they are above the previous limit of 5000, hence the user may actually end up with more than 5000 entries.

We’re working on making this concept more ‘intelligent’ and ‘configurable’ over releases.
At the moment, you can set up rules for objects to make sure their data that is needed offline for the users is downloaded.

More advanced capabilities will come over the next few releases.

With 15.11, we are enhancing the Offline Settings maintenance to enable key-users to setup the rules quicker.

Mass user on-boarding is quicker via the ‘Quick Add’ feature – you can select a role, and then using ‘Quick Add’, you can multi-select the rules for all objects in one shot.

Note that apart from business data, data such as code-lists and page layouts etc. are automatically downloaded by the applications. You do not need rules to be configured for them.

UPDATE: With 1605 – you can now control the related data download as well. You can choose to define the system wide behaviour to download ‘All’ related data, ‘Only for the first level’ or download ‘No’ related data at all.