Customizing Include / Customer Include

In my previous post, I mentioned about Append Structures using which tables or structures can be enhanced without modification.

One other way, followed mainly in SAP CRM application, to enhance tables and structures with modification is using Customizing / Customer Include technique.

About Customizing / Customer Includes

• Customizing / Customer Includes are structures which are allocated by SAP to act as a container for customer fields.
• They follow a special naming convention i.e. Customizing includes are prefixed with CI_ .
• SAP includes these non-existing structures in its original tables to be enhanced using keyword .INCLUDE . The special naming convention followed for Customizing Includes (CI_*) enable SAP NetWeaver to suppress activation errors in spite of missing included structure .
• Customer later during performing table enhancement creates Customizing Includes using special transactions and adds his fields to it.
• The fields in customizing includes need to be in customer namespace (YY* / ZZ*) in order to avoid conflicts with future fields added by SAP to the same table/structure.
• Same customizing include could be reused for multiple tables.

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