Document Management - store and retrieve

Question

Currently we are running on SRM 4.0 with SRM 5.0 server and Netweaver 6.4.   Our screens were developed using BSPs and running in SAP Portal 5.0 (soon to be 6.0, hopefully).   What is the recommendation for storing and retrieving documents?  There are SEVERAL postings on different sites, but not getting anywhere.  Some of the postings contain specific function modules (like Bapi_document_create2, CVAPI, O_Document_…) but were not found in our system.  We did find CL_BDS_DOCUMENT, but found the following statement "SAP currently recommends not using BDS or DMF. Even use of the other Knowledge Provider services should be evaluated carefully." within this site's documentation under Knowledge Provider section.  Can anyone refer us to some technical documents and hopefully sample code?

Answer 1

Your question is not easy to answer. There are different options to store and retrieve documents. First of all it depends on the functionality you need on your documents. Since I have no experience with SAP KM I can only talk about the options within SAP NetWeaver.
The SAP Knowledge Provider is divided into different part. The most basic part is the CMS API(Content Management Service) (All function modules starting with SCMS_*). This API allows the retrieval and storage of documents in terms of the SAP Knowledge provider document model where a document consists of components and each component corresponds to the content. With the CMS API you can store and retrieve those documents in a Content Server via the HTTP 4.5 interface.
Such a content server can be an external archive system that is certified for the HTTP 4.5 API (a list is provided by the ICC), the SAP data base or preferably the SAP content server (coming with SAP NetWeaver).
All document management services in SAP (SAP ArchiveLink, Business Document Service, SAP Records Management, Document Management System) are clients of the SAP Knowledge Provider CMS API.
Now, in order to model documents, the SAP Knowledge provider comes with the SAP DMS API. This DMS API is used to model complex document models (attributes, relations, ...) based on a so called content model that can be modelled via the document modeling workbench (DMWB). Here, the document management services mentioned above behave different. The SAP Knowledge provider is only infrastructure. This infrastructure has specializations using this infrastructure. Here are the most important ones I know about.
SAP ArchiveLink: This services offers the storage and retrieval of simple images and the service of linking those images to business objects. Those links are for example contained in the table TOA01.
So, the main focus here is to be able to navigate from a business object to the related images. It further has a workflow integration. The classical example is the invoice related to an FI document.
SAP ArchiveLink does not support any kind of document management functionality such as versioning and indexing. But, with the introduction of the SAP Document Finder, this can be done project specifically.
SAP ArchiveLink comes with a nice document viewer for viewing stored documents.
SAP Business Document Service: The business object serevice was designed to be a simple API for managing documents including simple versioning and indexing of images and documents.
SAP Document Management Service: This is the specialization with respect to PLM. So, DMS has the focus on engineering documents but can also be used to store other images and documents. SAP DMS offers document management functionalities such as check-in, check out of documents.
SAP DMS is using a classification service for classifying documents. It also has a very large BAPI API for the external access on those documents. As far as I know, SAP DMS is not part of SAP NetWeaver (therefore, you did not find CVAPI*).
SAP Records Management: SAP Records Management can be used for document management but is more than that.
Within Records Management it is possible to create hierarchical structures and to fill them with all kinds of documents. You can either integrate scanned images (via ArchiveLink) or you can use the SAP Records Management Document service provider offering some basic DMS functionalities such as versioning and indexing. The nice thing is that you can keep a whole structure of documents and even any other SAP objects such as business objects, transactions or URL's.
A typical application example is a HR personnel file. We've already done a lot of projects on that.
In the end, the choice of the document management infrastructure depends on the needs you have.
If you simply want to store and retrieve documents without any document management functionality ArchiveLink or simply the SAP CMS API will do.
If you need hierarchical structures for your documents and an integration with various business objects SAP Records Management would be a good choice.
You will find quite a lot of documentation in http://help.sap.com about these services.
Now, a last remark for web applications. Most of the GUI's of the upper applications are made for SAPGUI. So, here it is necessary to extend the SAP functionality by developing own applications. Since all services are using the CMS HTTP API for storing and retrieving the content you can always generate a URL for displaying the documents. Use SCMS_DOC_URL_CREATE for creating such a URL for example.
I hope, that helps a bit.
Torsten