Introducing Item Type based Text Schema

TM offers the possibility to use text schemas to maintain and propagate texts from predecessor documents. Dragos did a great job describing important parts here.

So far it was problematic to define a text schema for item based text determination. So far, the only way was to assign a text schema to TOR items was to assign a text schema to the BO node. In the example below, the text schema TORITM is assigned to the node ITEM_TR of BO /SCMTMS/TOR.

Example of assignment of text schema TORITM to the BO node /SCMTMS/TOR-ITEM_TR

This is possible, but actually a bad idea, as it means, that for ANY TOR based document this text schema is applied. And this can have a huge (negative) performance impact.

But so far, there was no better idea.

This has changed with the notes collected in note 3252150 – Text Schema Determination for TOR Items: Note Analyzer collection. This feature becomes available from S4CORE 106 onwards.

The basic idea is, that we introduce an option to define a text schema for an item type, and if this is note defined, nothing is done.

What needs to be done:

Step 1: Define for a document type, how the item text determination should be executed:

Actually you should always use the value I, whether you have item type based texts or not. If there are not text schemas assigned to the item type, nothing is done. Otherwise, the text schema defined for the item type is applied, we come to that part soon.

For compatibility reasons there is a compatibility mode (based on the assignment of the schema to the BO-node), which is only there for compatibility reasons, still bad idea.

Step two:  Define the text schema to be used for an item type

Example of item type assignment of text schemas

In the example, the Text Schema TORITM is assigned to the item type PACK. For the other items different or no schema is assigned.

This means, that the texts and text determinations are not different per item type.

Key takeaway: In case you have item-based texts and you are S/4 HANA 2021 or higher, you should take action and replace the old assignment ( definition of BO-node in a text schema) by the new option.