APO DP - validation of correct forecast profile

Question

We are using APO DP V5.0.
In interactive DP, we forecast at the level of 'product at customer'. For the 'product at customer' characteristic we have navigation attributes, such as 'history type' (eg EPOS, despatch)
The 'history type' determines which key figure we use as history, and so we have forecast profiles which are relevant for the different history types.
If a user assigns a forecast profile in interactive DP to a 'product at customer', we want to get the system to check that the forecast profile is actually valid for the relevant 'history type'. We have named the profiles carefully so that, for example, the first x characters of the profile name reflect the history type; so we could have validation logic saying 'if history type = EPOS, check that forecast profile starts with 'EPOS'.
But how could this validation logic be triggered?
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Bob Austin, Atos Origin

Answer 1

Hi Bob,
Wow, what a brain bender!
I think this would require some fairly serious ABAP...
You can't get the value of an attribute interactively (via a macro function, for example using ACT_IOBJNM_VALUE()).  You would need a Function Module that could manipulate the Planning Object Structure to grab the attribute of the characteristic in question, based on the current selection. 
The name of the forecast profile also can't be done with a standard APO macro function.  We had something similar where we wanted to get the name of the forecast strategy via a macro function, but we ended up needing to create a short Function Module in ABAP that could called as a User Exit Macro.  The trick with the Function Module is that you will need is to tell the system to get the GUID of the current selection, then use that to find the name of the Forecast Profile (field PRPFL) from the /SAPAPO/DP_FCST2 table. 
Once you have that, you could tell the Function Module to pass just the first four letters ('EPOS') back to the planning book user exit macro so that you could then compare that with the attribute value.
Probably you didn't need me to write this short functional spec, but it was a very interesting problem to consider.  Hopefully somebody else will read this and tell us a much simpler way to do it.
Dan