What is Transport of Copies in SAP

Whenever we think of transport in the SAP world, two things mainly come to our mind, Workbench request and Customizing request. Why so? Because we always deal with these two types of transport requests only. You may ask, what’s wrong with this approach, SAP only has these two types of transport requests, then why not use them? In this blog, we will see these things in detail and also check out what is the transport of copies in SAP, the third type of transport request.

Types of transport requests in SAP

SAP mainly provides three types of transport requests.

• Workbench :- This type of request is used for cross-client objects like SAP Notes.
• Customizing :- This type of request is used for client-specific objects.
• Transport of copies :- This is a special type of request which has only one target. We will see it in more detail shortly.

Also Read

Extended Transport Control in STMS

What is the Transport of Copies in SAP

Transport of copies is a special type of transport request which is available in SAP. You can create it via SE01 or SE10 transactions, the same way as the other two transport requests. But if you want to test your software changes in one system without having them transported automatically to other systems in your transport track, you can create a transport of copies. Transports of copies are not transported across your system landscape.

In simple words, if you create transport of copies in your DEV system with the target of the QAS system, then once you release it in DEV, it will be available in the QAS import buffer. But once you import it into the QAS system, it will not be then available to the next system in the transport route, i.e. PRD system. Thus transport of copies will die in the target system, hence there will be no maintenance of these TRs afterward.

How transport of Copies will help in a real-world scenario

As a standard, it is expected that the project manager or lead will create a transport request and assign tasks to each member as per their work. Once team members complete their work and capture objects in the task, they will release it, and at the end project manager or lead will verify all tasks and then release the main TR. In this way, a single TR will have all required objects/developments and thus management of changes will be easy.

But in a real-world scenario, this is not how it works. A project manager will never want to act as a bottleneck for creating TRs for team members, thus each team member will get access to create TRs. Now every team member will not like to wait for others to test his changes in QAS if those are not dependent on anyone. So they will create TRs as per requirements and move them to QAS, test, and in case of any issue, correct it in DEV via another TR and test. This cycle will go on till testing results are as expected.

You will ask, this is normal, whats issue with this process? Technically there is no issue, but from a change management point of view, you will need to manage a large number of TRs, in the correct sequence. This is overhead if working for a large project and in this way, you will end up handling more than 1000 TRs till you plan your production Go-Live.

Let’s Understand it via Example

If you use the transport of copies, then you can eliminate the overhead of handling a large number of transport requests, and change management will be easy. Let’s try to understand this via a small example.

• Create a TR (Customizing or Workbench) in DEV for your development activity, do not release it.
• Create ToC (transport of copies) via SE01/SE10, specify a target as QAS, and it will create a blank request.
• Use the option to include objects from other TR, and mention the original TR to get the required objects.
• Release ToC
• Import it in QAS
• Test your changes. In case of an issue, correct it in DEV using the original TR.
• Again create ToC and follow the same process till testing in QAS.
• If all is good, then you can release the main TR in DEV, and now that TR can move till PRD.

In this way, you can have all required objects in only a single TR and reduce the overall TR count to manage your project. Thus improving change management and smooth handling of Production Go-Live.

Transport of Copies In a Nutshell

Use transports of copies to transport changes to the quality assurance system. Doing so has the following advantages:

• Repository objects are locked for as long as possible in the development system.
• The number of transports in production is reduced. which means that the required import time is reduced and any potential downgrade risks are minimized.
• Transports of copies are periodically imported into the quality assurance system but do not follow the transport routes into follow-on systems.
• Only the original transports can reach production.

Reference

• Project Experience
• help.sap.com