I saw this asked a few times but no solution so I will ask again.
Imagine that you are creating a PO in ME21N. You have some Header Level Text and then imagine you have 2 items in this PO. Each of these two items has Item Level Text.
Once a PO is saved, I know how to use Read_Text to get the texts for the header and items. You simply pass which text you want (ex. F01) the PO number and the language and it returns the texts for the header. For item level you combine PO number and Item number you want in the Name parameter of Read Text (example 112233445500010) then tell it which text you want (ex F01) and that is how it knows which item you want the text for.
However: When the user is first creating the PO, they want to see how it will look in printing but prior to actually saving the PO. They dont want to save the PO until they know how it will print with Print Preview.
I was very surprised that the print preview actually worked for the Header Texts prior to saving. I debugged Read_Text and see that when it sees no PO number passed, it simply supplies the text (F01) and the language and pulls it out of an FM READ_CATALOG which I am assuming is memory. In theory, you will only have one F01 text at the header level and it makes sense to me that it is able to retrieve that.
BUT: My Item Level Texts are not returning anything. It makes sense to me as well because you cannot simply tell it give me the F01 texts you see because if you have multiple items, you will have multiple F01 texts, one for each item number if you put text to each item.
How can I get the item level texts out before saving the PO? Since the PO is not saved yet, there is no PO number and nothing is stored in STXH and STXL. Where are the texts stored and how can I retrieve them? I tried passing just the item number but as expected it still returned nothing.
Any ideas?