Purpose
In Application Link Enabling, youuse this program to distribute material items of product catalogs bydirectly sending them to othersystems.

Features
Message type "PCITEMS", displayed in the field Items messagecategory should generally be used to distribute product catalogitems (however, see &HINWEIS& below).

Selection
The scope of the item data to be transferred can be limited by thefollowing parameters:

• If you only select one catalog, you can select the relevant fields from
the variants of the catalog that are to be sent. Inthis case, texts are only distributed in the selected variantlanguages, and prices are only distributed in the variant currencies.

• If you only select one catalog, you can select the relevant fields for
the items you want to send from the layout areas ofthis catalog. The following rules apply:
If a base layout area (contains only items) is selected, all the itemscontained in it are sent.
If a hierarchy layout area (contains only layout areas) is selected,the items of all subordinate layout areas are sent.

• If only one catalog and only one base layout area is
selected, you can enter in the relevant fields items ofthe catalog that are contained in the selected layouut area. Therelationships between the items in the layout area are taken intoconsideration. If, for example, a generic material
or a set material is selected, then the relevantvariants or components are alsodistributed.
By entering logical systems in the relevant fields, you canlimit the list of IDoc recipients (stored in thedistribution model of Customizings foristribution (ALE)) to the recipients entered.
In the field Max. layout areas / IDoc, you can enter the maximumnumber of layout areas that can be sent together in one IDoc. If youexpect a lot of errors to occur in the receiving system when IDocs areposted, you should keep this value as low as possible, to make iteasier to find these errors. However, if few/no errors are expected,the value should be as high as possible, to obtain best possibleperformance during transfer.
If you select the Send item in full indicator, the followingdependent data is sent in addition to the actual item data:

• Material short texts


• Sales prices

This data is added in separate segments of the actualItem IDoc.
If you select the Create material IDocs indicator, you can alsosend the materials referenced in the product catalog variants using thereport for material master data. For information on the parametershere, please see the related documentation.
If you select the Create document IDocs indicator, you can alsosend the documents assigned to the layout areas.
If you enter a server group in the relevant field, the selecteddata is sent to the application server of this server group. If thedata of several product catalogs is distributed, a separate process isstarted on the application server for each individual product catalog.

Prerequisites
Catalog data can only be distributed by ALE to network systems forwhich the necessary settings have been made in Customizing fordistribution.
INCLUDE ISR_CUSTOMIZING
IF &DEVICE&='SCREEN'
In particular, the BAPIs
ProductCatalog.SaveHeadReplicaandProductCatalog.SaveItemsReplicamust be assigned to these systems in the distributionmodel (under Model and implement business processes >Maintain distribution model). If dependent data (customers,materials, documents, classification) is to be distributed with thepurely catalog-related data, the necessary entries must also be madefor this in the distribution model.
INCLUDE RWPC_DISTMODEL OBJECT DOKU ID TX
ALE distribution of product catalog also requires that the cataloglayouts to be distributed have the same layout number for all thesystems in a network. In addition, layout numbers of catalogs fromvarious systems that are to be replicated via ALE in the same receivingsystem cannot be the same, and catalogs created online in the receivingsystem cannot have the same number as layouts sent via ALE, as if theydo, data may be overwritten.
Therefore, in the receiving system, reserve separate layout numberranges for all original systems from which catalogdata is to be replicated via ALE.
The necessary steps can be found in Customizing for theproduct catalog under Assign number ranges to layout in ALEinbound.
ENDIF

Hinweis
In addition to message type PCITEMS (from Release 4.6A), messagetype PRDPOS (and those referencing it as of Relase 4.0A) is availablefor distributing product catalog items. PDRPOS should only be used ifthis is unavoidable for reasons of compatibility, as it will not betaken into consideration in future developments, and allabove-mentioned selection options, as well as integrated transfer (withthe exception of document IDocs) are not available for this messagetypes.

Further_hints
If the settings for inbound processing of dependent data are made sothat incoming IDocs are posted directly in the receivingsystem, errors may occur if the IDoc containing the item data has notalready been posted. In this case, the IDocs containing the dependentdata must be posted again (for example in a specially scheduled jobthat posted all IDocs again if they were not processed correctly).
To avoid this problem, you can schedule a periodic job for posting theitem data, and another for posting the dependent objects. If you allowsufficient time between the job for item data and the job for dependentdata, you can ensure that the IDocs containing the item data are postedbefore those containing the dependent data.