Extending Your SAP Marketing Cloud Solution

Now let’s look at the various possibilities to extend the standard functionality like custom fields, custom logic and custom business objects.

First, let‘s look at the Custom Fields app and see how to create a custom field.

In this example below, you can see the list of the custom fields with the "Published" status to be accessible for a specific business context.

To create a new custom field, you have to specify a business context. The business context refers to the business case in which it will be used later on. This means when you make a field available for certain UIs, reports, templates, or business scenarios, the field can only be used for those UIs, reports, templates, or business scenarios in the business context to which the field is assigned.

Take a look at the images below to see the process in more detail.

Now let‘s talk about custom logic.

The BAdI description defines where you can enhance an application. It also determines which parameters you can use to access and modify business data in your custom logic. The business context determines where your custom logic will be integrated. The implementation description is then executed within the scope of the data set that is relevant to a specific business part.

From an implementation perspective, you have to perform the following steps to create your own custom logic. First, you have to create your own implementation by using ABAP for key users. Then, test your custom logic with predefined test variants. As a third step, create filter conditions to define when the implementation description is executed. Finally, publish the implementation to your test system.

Custom business objects allow you to extend the SAP Marketing Cloud data model by adding database tables with specific fields. Using custom business objects, you can also generate UIs and applications.

This is the process of how to create a custom business object:

1. Open the Custom Business Objects app
2. Create code lists for reuse (optional)
3. Create custom business objects
4. Add fields to custom business objects
5. Create actions per node (optional)
6. Activate Service Generation Enable Associations (optional)
7. Generate UI Activate System Administrative Data (optional)
8. Publish custom business objects
9. Add custom logic to custom business objects (optional)
10. Export custom business objects

Now let’s look at the Custom Business Objects app where you can create and define a custom business object:

You can use this option when you want to use fields that are aggregated or calculated from an existing set of fields by using the Add Custom Views app. Creating custom views is a very powerful way of extending the standard functionality of SAP Marketing Cloud, however at the same time, it comes with some risks. For more information about custom views, please refer to this documentation on SAP Help Portal.

Below you will find some best practices for custom views.