According to SAP note 3053335, workflow rule actions that are scheduled “OnSave” are executed BEFORE the BeforeSave. Accordingly, the BeforeSave cannot influence the OnSave action.
However, SAP can enable a backend flag, called “Late Condition Evaluation”.
With that enabled, OnSave actions are executed AFTER the BeforeSave and therefore the BeforeSave suddenly has an influence on the OnSave action.
Some background information recently obtained via an SAP incident regarding the finalize logic (finalize means that BeforeSave is triggered):
In case you're facing a C4C dump (500 Internal Server Error), create an incident from it and find that the the Incident Context => /SAP/ABAP/RuntimeError file shows the error "Object instance creation of action rejection implementation class "<PDI solution namespace>_CL_ACTION_VALIDATION" of action "<PDI solution namespace>_<ID>" on node "ROOT" in BO "<BO>" failed" - you have to do a full solution activation to resolve the issue.
If you want to add an extension field to the standard c4codatapi service via Cloud Application Studio, you will find that "c4codataapi" is not listed in the ODATA dropdown when you create the ODATA Extension (.xodata) object.
Quick note to self: The SAP blog that mentioned that an exported solution is deployable in up to 2 future releases is here.
As C4C development systems (that are in development) use a different namespace than non-dev systems, one challenge is to adjust the CPI mapping of extension fields when moving to test or production.
When you are finished with development and unit testing in your dev environment, naturally, all CPI iflow mappings that involve extension fields would be mapped to the DEV namespace. If you simply move this iflow/mapping to your test system, it won't work, as the DEV namespace is not known in the test/production environment.
The C4C object identifier webservice (CommunicationServicesManagementQueryObjectIdentifierMappingIn/Query Object Identifier Mappings) only works if you supply the correct Remote and Local ID type code. Thankfully, the documentation (linked above) provides a list of type codes for commonly used objects, however, the employee business object is missing.
To make it short, the type codes for employee are:
I recently needed to modify the body of an HTTP response in a BSP page. Previously, the request was simply returning a status 403. This was done using request->set_status. So I assumed that I simply had to do request->set_cdata to set the HTML body corresponding to the status. But this was incorrect.
The correct approach was to use me->write (me referring to the BSP page in the DO_REQUEST method). I know too little about BSP to explain why the request and the BSP page are two different objects.
I came across this interesting article by Paul Hardy yesterday and in one of his screenshots he's using a pretty cool header/signature for his methods.
Surveys in C4C are a bit complicated. Here's a quick overview of the data structure (based on Ticket/ServiceRequest).