How to change Position Number in Sales Order?

Question

Hello Gurus,
I have the requirement to renumber the positions in an existing sales order.
For example position 000020 needs to be changed to position 000030.
Unforunately BAPI_SALESORDER_CHANGE cant do this apparently.
Anyone knows a way other than direct access to VBAP or deletion of position and after that inserting the new position?
Regards,
Vasco

Answer 1

For heaven's sake, stop thinking about changing it programmatically. You will land yourself in deep trouble. Better delete the order and create a new one.
Four years back , I was pitched in as an advisory consultant to design a solution to incorporate some IS-Retail feature in SD module .It gave me good exposure to study  standard sales process closely- how the standard program takes care of addition, insertion and modification operation. Basically, I had to do similar kind of thing via enhancement. There are so many scenarios and so many  tables like XVBAP, YVBAP, IVBAP, SVBAP to manipulate. If any table is filled incorrecly, data will be inconsistent and there will be short dumps. Other than that you also have to change the related tables like VBUK, VBUP, VBEP and the  tables that David Knittle mentioned. Some indexed tables like VAKPA & VAPMA are also updated along with VBAP.
System basically knows whether it is an insertion , update or deletion by checking the value of UPDKZ field. Also, for some scenario, probably for deletion ( forgot, did it long back ), two line items are created, one at the original position and one at the end.