Material Allocations Remain in MAPL after Routing

We have noticed that materials assigned to a routing remain in table MAPL linked to the deleted routing. Shouldn't the records in MAPL be deleted when the routing is deleted?

Deleting multiple material assignments one at a time in the routing prior to deletion of the routing is tedious especially when we can have hundreds of assignments per routing. Is there a better way?

Your responses are appreciated.


Many times you will find that in SAP, "delete" doesn't mean physically remove, but just set a switch/checkmark in a table. In MAPL, you will see that deleted assignments have the Deletion Indicator "X" set. This is how SAP will know not to use the assignment.

As far as I know, there is no standard way to delete material assignments from routings. I created a SHDB recording that goes into the transaction, selects one line, deletes it, and saves. Then I can run this for xxx times until all assignments are deleted. Makes it easier, but if you have a lot of routings to clean out still a bit tedious.

I actually asked an ABAPper to create a tool that does the same thing. They did it after some whining and moaning, and now it goes a bit faster yet. Still, you can not address a specific line in the assignment. All I do is to enter the routing group number, specify how many assignments to delete, and there it goes.

I would also like to know if there is a way to "archive" deleted assignments from MAPL. I know that you can do some tricky stuff with CA98, but that seems to apply to the routing/group counter rather than to the material assignment. I would like to remove assignments completely without affecting the routing. So basically back to the original posters question.