SAP R/3 : Sending Multiple PDF Invoice From Output Type

Sending email with an invoice attached to it has never occured to me if it can be done without the working mechanism of business workflow. The requirement was fairly simple during discussion and it was seriously sounded simple enough to put it straight to development immediately. However, I am not very familiar with business workflow. So the question now was how am I going to send an email out with an invoice attach to it. So here is the requirement in question:

"When user create an invoice via VF01 or from a customized IDOC that creates invoice, several output types are created and one of them is an outbound IDOC that will send back to the sender to let them know invoice has been created. Now, after the invoice and IDOC has been sent out, there should be a mechanism to check whether the outbound IDOC is successfully send out. If it is successfully sent out, the mechanism will grab that invoice, convert it to PDF, attach it to an email and send it to responsible recipients..."

Oh boy, it sounds easy to one who is not aware of the workaround behind or does it sounds very technical to one who has minimal working knowledge on it? I was the latter. So below are some of the questions which had formed in my brain:

1. How do you grab an invoice which has been produced by the system (VF01)?
The CLOSE_FORM function module will return a spool no when the SAPSCript has finish processing and display.

2. How do you convert an invoice to a PDF?

The CONVERT_OTFSPOOLJOB_2_PDF function module take the input of SAPScript and returns in PDF format.

3. How do you attach a PDF to the email?

The SO_NEW_DOCUMENT_ATT_SEND_API1 function module will hold the PDF

4. How do you send an email?

The SO_NEW_DOCUMENT_ATT_SEND_API1 function module will hold the PDF and send the email

After giving some thoughts to those questions above, now comes the big part of the whole mother of all questions:

How on earth at which point in the VF01 should I initiate this whole process?

So the my mind start to processing again. The answer to this might be using USER EXITS or Business Add-Ins (BADI). These two solutions seem to be the most absolute answer to the problem. However, when I revealed a solution at the end of this entry, you might find it with disbelief. But to the very few people who started with that solution was real good! Now, let me tell you what I had implemented initially to cater to that problem.

I went ahead to ST05 to get down all the USER EXITS and BADI from VF01 so I see which of them are more suitable to initiate this process. Doing so, I'd found one, it was XXXX. At this point, my imagination went beyond. Somehow, it is sometimes bad to venture too far from my own imagination. Because the next step I wanted to know how do I check the outbound IDOC's status from this USER EXIT XXX. It was simple, I used transparent table NAST and EDIDC to check the outbound IDOC's status. If its status are 03, 30 and XX, then it should go ahead to process the invoice convertion and IDOC send out. For the time being I'd solved 2 major problems.

Next, I need to get the latest invoice to do conversion. Unfortunately, with the current USER EXIT, I might not be able to get that SPOOL ID because it has not been created yet. VF01 has to be finished first. This pose another problem, how do I let VF01 finish off so I can get the SPOOL ID? After an overnight sleep, I decided that creating another RFC function module in the USER EXIT will do the trick. An RFC that executes with a new process created in the background. Thus, with this RFC initated as a new process run and letting the VF01 to finish processing, I can get the SPOOL ID.

Hence, I was definitely sure that my concept will surely work. However that will not work. Because of the RFC that i am using, it will cause overlapping. If you ever do my silly method, you will come across overlapping problem. RFC does not care if your PDF has been generated and sent by previoius document. It will just grab and resent everything including the new. Thus, my way does not work.

The only solution is to have the PDF converted, attached and sent from the print program. Not only does this eliminate duplicates of document but will ensure that it will not sent out duplicate copies of form due to overlapping. Printprogram should be any program that is used to process and display your SAPScript. For any standard program that prints forms, you can go to NACE to find out which program and form that it is using for print out. This way you also know the output type that is used by the standard program.

is sky the limit.... print, converting and sending...