Using transport of copies and deploy several features to production with SAP Cloud ALM in conjunction with CTS

This blog post will help you to understand how to use transport of copies within features to keep changed objects locked in the development system. Furthermore, it will show how several features can be deployed together by utilizing the transport information in the feature overview.

Handling transport of copies within features

Features in SAP Cloud ALM are there to deploy your change objects through your implementation landscape together with the documentation in the description area. In order to keep your development / customizing objects locked in the development system it is very helpful to create transport of copies. Transport of copies can be deployed to the quality assurance system without adding an entry to the import queue of your production system hence you can do some early testing without releasing the original transport request.

You need to create the transport of copies manually in the development system and add the objects of the transport requests in focus. Since the features holds the transport request IDs you can easily figure out the transport tasks to add the object lists to the transport of copies.

Assign the transport of copies to the same feature holding your original transport requests.

Assigned transport of copies

Now you can release the transport of copies in the development system to deploy the changes to the quality assurance system.

Released transport of copies

Now the “Deploy” button in the feature is enabled and you can deploy the changes to the quality assurance system without releasing the original transport requests.

Transport of copies deployed

Note: The target tenant for the transport of copies is not filled since it will not be added to the import queue of the production system.

Advantage is that your development teams need to collaborate when touching the same development / customizing objects in case of distributed development.

Deploy several features together to production

In case you are using release management in SAP Cloud ALM it makes a lot of sense to have an option to deploy several features together to production. To deploy a subset of transports assigned to several features you can utilize the excel export of the Feature Overview.

By using the release versions to bundle your features to be deployed to production together. you can easily filter for the feature status “Ready for Deployment” and the release version of interest in the Features Overview.

Selection via release version

Now export the result list to an excel file and take the transport request IDs from the respective column.

Excel export of feature overview

This selection can be used to filter in the import queue (transaction STMS_QUEUES) of your production system and import the subset of transport requests relevant for your release version.

Transport request selection and import

The beauty of it is that the import status will be pushed to SAP Cloud ALM so that you can check per feature for the proper deployment.

Example of feature with import status

Note: You won’t see the entry of the person who deployed the transport request to production in the history since it is done in the backend. Logs can be found in the backend system anyway.

Wrap-Up

In this blog post you’ve learned how to use transport of copies within features in SAP Cloud ALM supporting you in managing distributed developments by different teams. In addition, an option to handle releases of several features at once was outlined.

Both functionalities are planned to be available in SAP Cloud ALM. Deploying several features together via the feature overview in SAP Cloud ALM will be available soon. Creating transports of copies from within a feature is on the roadmap for 2023.

Looking forward to receiving feedback. For latest updates and notifications, you can follow me by clicking Moritz Gysler.