Sap Documentation and the Spirit of Open Source

Question

Hi,
I have noticed that not all of SAP functions have documentation (for example in SAP CRM there are around 80.000 functions and many of them, I dare say most of them, have no documentation and I suppose this is the situation for all SAP solutions).
I spoke to someone from SAP and I was told that not all of them need to, as they are not supposed to be used by clients. I agree with this and moreover it would be a tedious process for SAP to do it now. But sometimes need arises to use this functions or at least know what they do.
And the standard search for Functions .....
One enters "dialog popup" in Short description and he gets nothing (in SAP CRM 3.1 SP06).
She/he has to enter "dialog Popup" and thus gets the function POPUP_TO_CONFIRM
It is LUDICROUS ! Need no say more !
I do have an idea, SAP community could help out.
If all the functions would be shared among the SAP developers from all over the world – I mean those who would like to participate in this project - all functions will have documentation in less than 1 year.
Let's take as example - PHP:
Every function is documented and an example is given.
Also, developers from all over the world add their own comments for each function.
There is a .chm help file very easy to search
Plan:
There would be one main writer and one main reviewer for a function (I mean one could choose to do 100 functions, other 50, other 30, and so on).
Also, who wants could add his/hers comments.
Objective:
To have a documentation (.chm file) as comprehensive as possible about all the functions in SAP.
Is this plan feasible ? Are there any volunteers ?
Mihai

Answer 1

I can agree on some points but not others.  First, let's agree that dialog popup and popup dialog are two different search strings.  In SQL, this would produce "WHERE description like "%dialog popup%" which is clearly not equivalent to "%popup dialog%".  However, I feel your pain.  While the level of function docs is disappointing, how wonderful that we even have access to them at all!  One of the best parts of SAP is the fact that I don't have to guess "how that works".  I can go look and learn from the master code ... albeit slowly. 
My understanding of German is non-existent.  Therefore, much of the comments that are available in the functions are lost on me.  That's a shame.  I would like to see an effort to get readable English comments out of these valuable German comments.  That' would take a native speaker's translation vs. a babelfish-like systran.  They just don't cut it.
Docs:  The level of SAP documentation in general, even for BAPIs, is appalling.  Maybe I just don't know where it is but from what I've seen, even the most complex BAPI docs are not worth the space they take up.
Case in point: BAPI_SALESORDER_CREATEFROMDAT2.  This is a rather complex BAPI which can create all manner of sales documents.  So let's say I want to build a configured sales order.  Let's hit the BAPI documentation:
<i>If the item is configurable, you need to enter the configuration data in the ORDER_CFGS_REF, ORDER_CFGS_INST, ORDER_CFGS_PART_OF and ORDER_CFGS_VALUE tables.</i>
That's it.  There might be a few more hints down the page but there are no examples, no "here's why you need to stick an A in field XYZ", etc.  This is why I rely on reading code and trying to gets hints from poorly translated German comments.  I generally get an answer but what a time waster that is!  If SAP is claiming that they don't document all functions because they are not "supposed to be used by clients", then how about fully documenting the BAPIs at least?  Those certainly ARE for use by clients.  That's their main purpose.
As a concept, I agree with you.  How to pull that off?  Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable documenting any function that I've not had 1st hand experience with.  Even still, I've only used about 20% of the sales order BAPI's capability.  While that's 18% better than what SAP gives, I'm not sure I would be willing to take the time to document it given that I'm stretched to the max, in part, due to the lack of function docs!  Catch-22.
Good luck with the idea.  I'd like to see what other people's comments are.  I'm hoping that I'm missing some key documentation resources.  If nothing else comes from this thread, that would be great.
Maybe the SDN would provide a place/forum to store documentation that is created?  Not a forum ... more like SAP notes (which can be a helpful source of docs sometimes BTW).
Thanks.