Recording sessions is backed by quite a bit of tooling, which can be confusing. That's a petty, because the tooling is available to you or your end user, it works and it has enormous potential. A brief article on how it all associates to each other. What's SM35 relation to SHDB ?
The BDC session or recording is a given - that's not what this article is about. Many Abap developers have used the mechanism to call a transaction or perform some update through screen flow. Some have already used it to create BDC groups, where a group can be opened, BDS session recordings can be added and the group can be closed again. The result of this BDC group can be executed via report RSBDCSUB which would make it stay out of the view of end users. BDC groups can also be handed to transaction SHDB, a recorder tool (focus on the RECORD parameter to control this).
Session recording in LSMW
For those of you that use recordings in LSMW, you will find that the exact same tooling is used for a recording, however the results are not visible in SHDB but in SM35. A trick has been applied in LSMW, where some special coding was applied that only works under/for LSMW, see Legacy System Migration Workbench Probably because BDC sessions that are spit out of a migration tool are expected to be larger than ones created by an Abap development. So for LSMW the whole SHDB functionality is skipped. The tool aready does it for you, so the makers of the migration toolbox figured there is no added value in SHDB.
All in all this is a bit confusing: BDC groups that are created from the Migration Workbench get special treatment. Where as an Abap report that produces the same BDC group (using the same function modules OPEN_GROUP etc), will become available in SHDBand not in SM35.
The solution is simple: SHDB and SM35 are lined up. A recording tool, from which recordings can be started and a recording execution tool, from which recordings can be started, checked, and scheduled to run in the background. An SHDB recording can be handed to SM35 by selecting it and chosing "Create session".
Session recording in eCatt
The SAP computer aided test tool (eCatt, transaction SECATT) also utilizes the BDC session, as a TCD recording. Find out about eCatt What is eCatt ? and How does it work ? .