Governing guidelines: versions, documentation and tests

Partner specs change. Great Lakes adds a depot, Lakeside moves to a newer X12 version, an auditor asks which mapping created last March's invoices. Governance is what lets Theo answer in minutes: which guideline version is live, who approved it, what changed, and what proves it works.

The status lifecycle

MIGs and MAGs have three statuses: Draft, Active and Deprecated. A new guideline is Draft, version 1.0. Activate makes it Active and read-only; you can still export documentation and runtime artifacts. To change an active version, choose Edit: Integration Advisor asks you to confirm and creates the next version as a Draft (active 2.0 gives draft 3.0). When that draft is activated, the previous active version becomes Deprecated. There is at most one Active and one Draft version per guideline, and the History button shows all versions with status and who changed or imported them.

Two rules shape the order of work. A MAG can only be activated after its source and target MIGs are active, and a MIG on a custom message needs the custom message activated first. And activation is the moment structural content is contributed, anonymously, to the proposal knowledge base; the confirmation dialog lists what will and won't be published. SAP recommends activating any guideline used productively, so that it is protected from unwanted changes and new requirements go into a separate draft.

Versions in Trading Partner Management

TPM versions its own artifacts separately. Agreement templates and agreements start as a draft; Save as New Version creates numbered versions (1.0, 2.0 and so on) that are read-only. There can be one draft and at most five numbered versions per artifact. SAP advises creating and versioning only in the development tenant and transporting to the others, never developing in parallel. A new MAG version reaches agreements through Update MIGs/MAGs. Agreements created with Bind with Template pick up template changes; copied ones are updated one by one or through that cross action.

Documentation that partners and auditors can read

Every MIG and MAG can be exported as Documentation (PDF), Documentation (RTF) or Documentation (Excel). Under Settings > MIGs and MAGs you maintain the export template: document titles, cover lines, logo and splash image, footer text, contact and copyright links, and whether administrative data is shown. Contoso sends the PDF of each outbound MIG to the partner as its implementation guide, so Lakeside receives exactly what Contoso's runtime enforces. For inbound partners, the MIG's notes link back to the partner's own spec by page and version.

Linking guidelines to specs, tests and agreements

Integration Advisor stores versions and history; it doesn't know which partner spec, test run or approval belongs to which version. Contoso keeps that link in a small register per partner message: MIG and MAG name and version, the partner spec version and date, the SAP Cloud ALM test case and run that passed, the approver, and the TPM agreements or integration flows that use the version. Compare on a MIG or MAG shows what changed between two versions (structure, documentation, properties, code values, status and example values), and that comparison is attached to the change as review evidence.

Migration, overlays and protection

• Migrate a MIG to another version of the same message, or another message entirely, from More Options. A new MIG is created and customizations are copied on a best-effort basis; incompatible ones are reported. When Lakeside announced a move from X12 004010 to 005010 (an illustrative what-if), the team migrated the MIG, reviewed the reported nodes with the review status, and compared both versions with Compare.
• Overlay MAGs keep one base mapping for a message and partner-specific deviations on top. If a second fleet customer sends X12 850s that differ from Great Lakes only in depot codes, an overlay avoids a full copy that would drift.
• Protect MIGs, MAGs, global code value mappings and custom codelists so that only users with the ExtendedContentDeveloper role can change them. Others can still read, export and copy. Protection is tenant-local and isn't carried by export and import.
• Export and import of MIGs and MAGs as ZIP moves content between tenants (up to 500 MB per export). The Export dialog shows how many MIGs, MAGs and versions exist, which helps prove a complete move.