SAP ABAP Background Jobs – How To Manage, Get To Know The Key Points
SAP provides a Central Area (single screen), to manage all sorts of Background Job related issues, which are as follows:
Monitoring and managing jobs
Defining jobs
Scheduling, rescheduling and copying existing jobs
Editing and Rescheduling of Jobs and job steps
Repeating a job
Debugging an active job
Reviewing information about a job
Cancelling a job’s release status
Cancelling and deleting jobs
Comparing the specification of different jobs
Checking the status of jobs
Reviewing job logs
Releasing a job to run
For managing the above mentioned capabilities, we need to follow certain procedures.
For specifying jobs:
To specify job, we need to open “Job Overview Screen”. For that, either we need to choose CCMS Jobs Maintenance or to call SM37. SAP system first shows Select Background Jobs screen, where we have to select criteria for the jobs, we want to manage, and of which some criteria’s are mandatory or required fields. These criteria include:
Job name – Required ( here we can use a wildcard(*) to get a range of similar job names )
Name of the user who scheduled the job – Required (here also we can use wildcard )
Job Status
Planned or actual start time
Job start condition or event linked to start condition
Job step
Periodicity of job
We can also choose Extended Job Selection, where we pin point our criteria regarding selection of exact job. An administrator of Authorizing for Background Processing can display Jobs in all clients. Without authorization, only jobs in current client will be displayed.
Now we choose. Execute.
Managing and Monitoring Jobs:
After selecting the job which we want to manage, we can choose various management tasks as described in following part
To copy a single existing job – choose Job Copy
To reschedule or edit job steps or attributes of a single job — choose Job Change. A job step is an independent unit of work within a background job. Each job step can execute an ABAP or external program. Other variants or authorizations may be used for each job step. The system allows displaying ABAP programs and variants. We can scan a program for syntax errors. We can also display the authorizations for an authorized user of an ABAP job step.
To repeat a single job — choose Job Repeat scheduling.
To debug an active job — choose Job Capture: active job. Here, only a single selection is allowed. If an active job seems to be running incorrectly (e.g., running for an excessively long time), we can interrupt and analyze it in debugging mode in a background process, and then either release it again or stop it altogether. Note: we will be able to capture a background job only if we are logged on to the SAP server on which the job is running. To find server information in the Job Overview, select and marks the job, then choose Job – Job details.
To review information about a job — choose Job – Job details. Details displayed can include:
current
job status
periodicity, or the repetition interval other jobs linked to the current job, either as previous or subsequent jobs
defined
job steps spool requests generated by the current job
To cancel a job’s “Released” status, select the job or jobs from the Job Overview list and choose Job Release -> Scheduled.
To cancel a job from running but keep the job definition available, select the job or jobs from the Job Overview list and choose Job – Cancel active job.
To delete a job entirely, select the job or jobs from the Job Overview list and choose Job – Delete. Jobs with the status of Ready or Running cannot be deleted.
To compare the specifications of more than one job, select the jobs from the Job Overview list and then choose Job – Compare jobs.
To check the status of jobs, we select the job or jobs from the Overview Job list and then choose Job – Check status. This allows us to either change the job status back to Planned or cancel the job altogether. This is especially useful when a job has malfunctioned.
To review job logs, we will select a job or jobs with the status Completed or Canceled from the Job Overview list and then choose Goto – Job log.
To release a job so it can run, first we select a job from the Job Overview list and choose Goto – Release
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By Abhishek Khandelwal (on behalf of SAP Consulting Team)
