Data Migration Cockpit Date issue for all migration objects

[BMEIJS]

We are busy with an upgrade from S/4HANA 1809 to 2021. We are using the DMC and have copied our own migration objects to a new migration project. Now we started testing SAP standard and custom migration objects and we are running into problems with the Date format for all migration objects. We are using the Files/Staging Table scenario.

The issue is that during upload of any DMC-file with date-type fields, we get the same error messages for every date-type field like 'POSTING_DATE', 'VALID_FROM, VALID_TO etc. For every date-type fields we get two error messages:

CNV_DMC_MD_EXTRACTOR 033 Field "Datum: berekening geldig tot" from sheet "Rekenwaarden" has a wrong data type in line 9

CNV_DMC_MD_EXTRACTOR 034 Data type Date is expected in field "Datum: berekening geldig vanaf"

We follow the normal steps: download XML-template, populate using Excel (XML 2003 Excel format), save and then upload in the DMC Fiori App.

When populating the XML in Excel we use the date-format dd.mm.yyyy as described in the Introduction Sheet of the Template. The Dutch date format is the same as the German format.

If we look at the XML-file in an XML-editor, we see that the date fields have a type String and not Date. Check lines 1096/7 below.

We found that during the upload a Validation is performed in method:

CL_DMC_MD_EXTRACTOR_EXCEL_XML=>VALIDATE_PAYLOAD_DATA_TYPE at location 159-160

At runtime, value for LV_TYPE is String, not Date. This leads to the two error messages.

The reason it is a type String and not Date is because in Excel, the following cell format is being used.

Apperently, this is translated by Excel-XML to type String. There is no Date (Datum) format of type dd.mm.yyyy in Excel.

I have already reported this as an incident at SAP but I'm curious if we are the first to encounter this problem. I found no SAP notes or other questions or blogs about this problem.

Currently we change the XML-file: for every date field we change type String to Date. After that, the upload is no problem.

In my opinion, the validation should be changed because there is as far as I know no excel Date-format available for dd.mm.jjjj. So for date fields, type String should just be accepted.

[BMEIJS]

For those interested in the answer to my question: we got the following answer from SAP

"I need to inform you that from 2021 onwards system won’t accept formats like DD.MM.YYYY or MM.DD.YYYY or YYYY.MM.DD. The dot ‘.’ won’t be accepted by the system anymore and will throw the validation error.

Thus, you need to input below date formats, and you won’t get any validation error related to date type. (...)

DD/MM/YYYY or DD-MM-YYYY

MM/DD/YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY

YYYY/MM/DD or YYYY-MM-DD"

I entered my date fields in format DD-MM-YYYY in the Excel XML and now the Validation and storing in staging tables works.

The confusing bit is that in the downloaded template for the file, it says

In the XML the format now looks like this