In this lesson we will have a closer look at this process and the necessary preparation steps. Before we go ahead, let’s have a look at the relevant part of the development life cycle again:
Once all development tasks have been finished and the solution has reached a state where it can be moved to another test or a production tenant, it needs to be assembled and downloaded. This results in a zip file that can be uploaded to the "next" tenant.
Depending on your landscape and applicable lifecycle process, the "next tenant" might be a separate test tenant where business users can test all features thoroughly. This is the recommended way to ensure the highest quality. Alternatively, the next tenant could also be the production tenant right away.
In both cases, you should test all developed features as much as possible inside the development tenant, either by developers or better by business users/testers. Because assembling the solution finalizes the current working state and the solution becomes read-only. All subsequent changes require a patch, or to be more precise, a patch solution.
The following video demonstrates how to assemble and download the solution:
Assemble and download can be triggered from the "Implementation Manager" which can be reached from the "Administration" menu. According to the name of the menu, this is an administrative task. Hence, the user needs the "PDI_ADMINISTRATION" access right.
The assembly process can take quite some time. By default, it’s running in the foreground. That means you have to wait until the studio completes the task. For larger solutions, there is an alternative to run assembling in the background, whereby you can work on other solutions with the studio and download the zip file once assembling is finished. This blog article on SAP community describes the details.
The downloaded zip file contains all files of the solution. It is possible to inspect the downloaded zip file on your computer, for example, to view the content of a script or a BO definition file. However, be aware that you cannot change the content of the zip file. Systems would detect changes on the file during upload and reject it.