Background

The goal of a Testimony installation is to record real user transactions executed in a production SAP system and play them back into a copy of that system. The playback system is based on a backup of the production system as it was at the start of the recording, thus ensuring that the initial data state of the playback system matches the data state of production when the recording started. The problems that occur as a part of this are:

1. It will take some time to create the copy of production and therefore there will be a difference in the date and time the recording was made and when the playback is actually executed
2. Most production recordings will stretch over at least one “midnight boundary”, i.e., the recording starts on one day and ends on the next (or a subsequent) day.

Unfortunately, many SAP transactions are date-bound. In other words, the date entered on the screen is validated against the system date. For example, if Testimony records a financial posting on 1st May, but the playback is run on 5th May, then the posting transaction will fail in the playback with a “Cannot post in the past error” as the playback will try to post with the recorded date of 1st May.

In order to solve this problem, one option would be to set the operating system clock at the start of the playback to the date and time at the start of the recording. However, this is not possible in many cases because, for example, servers are linked to an NTP server which synchronises the time on all servers in the estate. As a way around this, use of Testimony includes rights to use Vornex’s TimeShiftX software to enable the setting of “virtual clocks”. This software allows you to set the date and time (and also clock speed) for specific operating system users without physically changing the OS clock.
In an SAP environment, you would set virtual clocks for the SAP administration userid and the database userid. This has the effect of giving the SAP system a different date and time to the underlying operating system, allowing you to avoid the date-related errors mentioned above.