What is Background Processing

In background processing, the SAP System automatically runs any report or program that you can start interactively.

When you schedule a job in the background processing system, you must specify:

• The ABAP report or external program that should be started
• The start time
• The printing specifications

The background processing system starts your job and runs the program(s) that you specify. Afterwards, you can check whether your job was executed successfully and display a log of any system messages.

Suppose you need to run a report of customers whose bills are overdue.You can:

• Start the report yourself from the ABAP Editor. If you do this, the system runs the report interactively, in a session at your PC or workstation. While the report is being processed, your computer response time may be slower.
• Or, you can have the background processing system run the report. To do this, you must create a background job that tells the system what you want it to do.

The background processing system runs your "late bills" report according to your instructions. The list generated by the report is either printed directly or is waiting for you in the SAP output controller (see Using the Output Controller).You can also check in the background processing system whether the report ran correctly.

Features

• Running a report in the background does not tie up the SAP sessions you are currently working with.

When you start a report interactively, your current SAP session is blocked for further input for as long as the report runs.

When you start the report in the background, running the report does not influence your interactive work with the SAP System.

• You can shift the execution of reports to the evening or other periods of low load on the SAP System.

You can schedule a report or external program to run at any time that the SAP System is active. You can also set up reports to run automatically on a regular basis (for example, on the last day of each month).

• Background processing is the only way you can execute long-running jobs.

To prevent tying up system resources with interactive sessions for long reports, the SAP System has a built-in time limit on interactive sessions. If a single ABAP report runs for more than 5 minutes continuously in an interactive session, the SAP System terminates the report automatically.

The background processing system executes long-running ABAP reports more efficiently. Often, such reports are automatically scheduled for execution in the background. In this case, you do not need to schedule them for background processing yourself.