Recipient Determination in Workflow Rules in SAP Cloud for Customer

From the release 1911 of SAP Cloud for Customer, you’ll notice new and exciting features while configuring the recipients in the workflow rules of type e-mail in SAP Cloud for Customer. In this blog post, I want to share the features existing till the release 1908, what has been added in 1911 and how it will help you out in configuring the recipients in a more flexible manner.

The ability to automate a process of sending out an e-mail, sms, notification, WhatsApp text, updating field(s) or triggering an action on a create/update of a document through workflow rules has been a key component of SAP Cloud for Customer. Until the release 1908 of SAP Cloud for Customer, an e-mail could only be sent out to the recipients who were the business partners in the system. A recipient could be an account, contact, individual customer or an employee. Workflow Rule didn’t support sending out an e-mail directly to an e-mail address which was not associated with any business partner in the system.

Earlier, you could configure recipients in the workflow rule only in the following two ways:

1. Recipient determination: This includes a set of standard recipient determinations depending on the Business Object for which the workflow rule is configured. It also includes z-parties defined by the customer in the business configuration.
2. Employee: This option is used to directly configure all those employees who should be receiving the e-mail whenever the workflow rule is triggered.

The above-mentioned ways of configuring the recipients could meet most of the customer’s use cases, but did not meet the following scenarios:

1. Ability to send out e-mail directly to an e-mail address
2. Ability to create your own custom recipient determination to meet the use cases which are not covered by the standard recipient determinations

From the 1911 release, you will see the following new features which have been added to Workflow rules of type e-mail that will help you to achieve the above-mentioned scenarios:

1. E-Mail Address: With this feature, you will be able to configure in workflow rule, the e-mail addresses to which the e-mail can be sent out directly
2. Custom Recipient Determination: With this feature, you will be able to do your own PDI enhancement implementation. In that implementation, you can write your own logic to return a table of business partner UUIDs that are existing in the system, and/or to return a table of e-mail addresses. If you configure this custom recipient determination in the workflow rule, then the workflow rule will call the determination during its execution and will send the e-mail to the business partners and/or to the e-mail addresses returned by your custom implementation.

You can follow the following steps to implement the Custom Recipient Determination:

1. Login into your cloud application studio.
2. Right click on your PDI solution and click on Add-> New Item.
3. Select Extension from left hand side tree and select Enhancement Implementation. You have to provide some meaningful enhancement implementation name in the Name field and click on Add. Please note that the same name will appear under Custom Recipient Determination when you configure the workflow rule.
4. Select Namespace and Enhancement Option as shown below and click on OK.
5. Select .fltr file which got created from the Solution Explorer and provide the MO name for which this custom recipient determination will trigger.
6. Double click on DETERMINE_CUST_RECIP.absl file. You can write your custom logic to determine the recipients depending on your business use case in this file. The output of the code can be stored in result variable which can have both business partner UUID’s and/or the recipient email ids to whom the e-mail will be sent out. You need to activate all the files and the solution once your code changes are done.
7. Now when you will configure the workflow rule, you will see the custom recipient determination that was created under Custom Recipient Determination table.

Once you have activated the rule, at the time of its execution, it will call the custom recipient determinations configured in it along with the other Recipient Determinations, Employees and E-Mail addresses configured to send out an email to all the determined recipients.

As you can see, with these new features, the possibility to determine Recipients in workflow rules of type e-mail is extremely flexible and helpful.