For importing actuals into EcoSys, there are two automatic variables called [LastRunTime] and [OperationStartTime] that you can specify for the date range parameters.
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[LastRunTime] provides the timestamp of the latest actual line item record imported during that operation. This provides for very fine-grained incremental loads that resume immediately after the most recently imported record each time. Use this variable as your start date parameter for incremental load of actuals.
The last run time for each operation is stored in the EcoSys database, so it does not matter whether the operation was invoked from the EcoSys UI or from a command line batch job. The last run time reflects the correct value.
You can view the LastRunTime value for any given operation in the Operation dictionary screen on the General tab. The LastRunTime before and after values are also written to the batch job log when an operation executes, whether or not the variable is used in the operation parameters.
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[OperationStartTime] provides the timestamp of the beginning of the operation. This is useful to prevent different project elements from using different end dates while bringing in actual line items that may be created during the run of the operation. Use this variable as your end date parameter for incremental load of actuals.
Without this variable, project elements processed toward the end of the job pick up actual line items created during the run, and project elements processed at the beginning of the job miss their corresponding line items on the next job.
The syntax for the variables is shown below.
<parameters>
<parameter name="costObjectExternalIds">
<id>N-12345-0000-0000-0000</id>
<id>N-14001-0000-0000-0000</id>
<id>N-22010-0004-0000-0000</id>
</parameter>
<parameter name="includeSubCostObjects">Y</parameter>
<parameter name="version">System Actuals</parameter>
<parameter name="startDate">[LastRunTime]</parameter>
<parameter name="endDate">[OperationStartTime]</parameter>
</parameters>
If no records are matched for import, LastRunTime is set to the start of the filter date range.
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For import jobs other than importing actuals, [LastRunTime] reflects the last time the operation was invoked, not the latest record imported each time. This variable is primarily intended for use in incremental imports of actuals.
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For systems using Microsoft SQL Server for the EcoSys database, the timestamp values’ precision goes down to only 3-5 milliseconds, so rounding to the nearest 5 millisecond value was being done prior to EcoSys 7.1. From EcoSys 7.1 onwards, there was a change to how the last runtime is captured to make it database independent. As such, there is no need for this rounding. However, to make adapter backward compatible with EcoSys versions prior to 7.1, a new external data source setting, latestRecordTimestampIncrement is being introduced. The default value for this parameter is 1. However, for compatibility purposes, we recommend setting the value to 5 in the data source configuration .xml file.
<parameter name="latestRecordTimestampIncrement">5</parameter>
Refer to Appendix: Configure commit size for Forecast/Actuals ImportI for the complete configuration .xml file.
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[OperationStartTime] is in the local time zone of the EcoSys server. If your SAP system uses a different time zone, using this option is not recommended.