Do you want to know how to make a key user custom field visible in an SAP GUI UI by enabling the field for the respective UI via the key user custom field tool and then finetune the exact placement of the field using the Adapt UI for classic applications using Screen Personas?

If your answer is yes, then this blog post is just for you.

This blog post covers the following topics:

1. How to make a key user custom field visible in the SAP GUI UI via the Key User Custom Field tool
2. How to finetune the exact placement of the key user custom field visible in the SAP GUI UI
3. What the limitations are when you use both adaptation techniques jointly

As this scenario is quite a complex one, we make it as tangible as possible and follow a concrete example, which is close to real-world use cases we know from several SAP customers:

A customer created a key user custom field “My important custom field” using the custom field key user tool in business context “Sales: Sales Document (SD_SALESDOC)” (for details see Creating Custom Fields). Now this field should be made visible in the Sales Processing UI “Change Sales Order” and place the field in the first tab (the “Sales” tab) of the header screen.

Prerequisites

You’ve created a key user custom field “My Example Field” as described in in Creating Custom Fields in business context “Sales: Sales Document (SD_SALESDOC)” and you want to make it visible in the Sales Processing UI “Change Sales Order” and place the field in the first tab (the “Sales” tab) of the header screen.

Process Steps

1. Make the custom field visible in the SAP GUI UI
   Open your key user custom field “My Example Field” in the Custom Fields app and navigate to the User Interfaces tab. Find the entry of the SAP GUI UI “Create, Change, or Display Sales Documents (Header)”, where you want to make the field visible. A simple way to find the entry for this respective UI within the list of all UIs is to focus on the entries which are of type “SAP GUI”. As soon as you have found the entry in the list, enable it by clicking “Enable Usage” and then save and publish the custom field.
   The following screenshot shows the “Edit Field” screen of the Custom Fields app with the enabled SAP GUI entry.
   

2. Check where in the SAP GUI UI the custom field has been placed automatically
   As soon as you’ve finished step 1 and you know the respective SAP GUI UI “Sales – Sales Order Processing: Change Sales Orders (VA02)”, you will find the field there (see screenshot below) when you click “Menu” on the top left of the “Change Standard Order” screen. Then, select Goto à Header à Additional Functions à Additional Data B and go to the “Custom Fields” tab.

   

   Automatically placed custom field in SAP GUI UI

3. Use the Adapt the UI for Classic Application functionality to place the custom field exactly at the location where you want to have it 

   By now, the custom field “My Example Field” has been automatically placed to the “Custom Fields” tab of the SAP GUI UI. It has been positioned in relation to the other custom fields on the tab automatically, too. If you want to change the exact position of this custom field within this tab or even want to move the field to another tab, such as to the “Sales” tab, it’s now time to bring the Adapt UI for Classic Applications using Screen Personas into the game. It  addresses exactly those SAP GUI UI adaptations needs:

   1. Similar to what is described in this blog (https://blogs.sap.com/2022/04/01/getting-started-with-ui-adaptations-for-classic-applications-in-sap-s-4hana-cloud/ ) you switch into the UI adaptation mode by selecting the “Adapt UI” menu option from the user action menu that is displayed when you select your avatar on the top right of the screen.
   2. As soon as you have switched into the UI adaptation mode you can start to create a UI adaptation that is called flavor. For this select the plusbutton on the right corner of the flavor manager. This opens the flavor editor in which you  capture all the UI changes you want to group together for an application and one set of users. You can create several flavors for one application to serve different needs of users.
   3. Now move our custom field “My Example Field” from the “Custom Fields” tab to the “Sales” tab. The easiest way is to use the “parking lot” feature that allows you to grab a UI control from one area of the application, place it in the intermediate location of the parking lot, navigate to the target location in which you want to place the UI control and the take the UI control from the parking lot to the target location. To call up the parking lot, select the “Design” tab and choose “Parking Lot”.. A small screen pops up allowing you to drag and drop the “My Example Field” from the “Custom Fields” tab to the “Parking Lot” window and then from there to the “Sales” tab (see screenshot below).
      
                                             Drag the custom field to the parking lot
      

      Drop the custom field from the parking lot to the target location

   4. You can achieve the same by cutting the field on the “Custom Fields” tab and pasting it on the “Sales” tab. You can multi-select by holding CTRL while clicking on the label and input field. Alternatively, you can use the lasso tool by holding Shift and then clicking and dragging your mouse over both UI controls to select them.
      Please note that the “copy” and the “clone” option which are also available are not the right options to use here as the binding information of the field would get lost.
   5. As soon as you are done with your UI adaptations, you can save your flavor by selecting “Save” on the top of the flavor editor. Now, you are done.

If you want to know how to make sure that this change is now applied for every user who has assigned a specific business role, read the following blog: https://blogs.sap.com/2022/04/01/getting-started-with-ui-adaptations-for-classic-applications-in-sap-s-4hana-cloud/ . Here, you can also get more information on how to transport this UI adaptation to subsequent systems.

With Adapt UI for Classic Applications using Screen Personas you can also define the custom field as static read-only. You can do this by selecting the respective field and navigating to the “Home” menu choice. On its submenu, select “More Options” and then, select “Read Only”.

Note

When you change the exact location of the custom field using the functionality of Adapt UI for classic  SAP Screen Personas, the respective SAP Screen Persona flavor is applied to the control that contains the custom field. As soon as you remove a custom field from the respective SAP GUI UI or add a custom field to this respective SAP GUI UI, the assignment of all custom fields to the custom field controls in this SAP GUI UI may change. In this case, it’s likely that the assignment of the custom fields to the custom field controls in the SAP GUI UI may have changed. If this is the case, validate if the placement is still fine and if not, repeat the placement of the custom fields with SAP Screen Personas again.

Now, you are done! Congratulations!

This blog focuses on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition and describes the Adapt UI for Classic Application Using Screen Personas  functionality. Similar functionality is also available with SAP Screen Personas as add-on to   SAP S/4HANA on premise. For more information, see SAP Screen Personas | SAP Help Portal.

Further Information:

• Product documentation for Adapt UI for Classic Applications Using Screen Personas:
  User Guide and Administration Guide
• openSAP Course for Adapt UI for Classic Applications Using Screen Personas

Related Information:

Please note that in order to be able to execute the steps described above, you need a respective user in the customizing tenant having at least the following business catalogs assigned to this user:

• SAP_CORE_BC_EXT_FLD
• SAP_CORE_BC_EXT_FLEX
• SAP_CORE_BC_UI_PER_ADM_PC
• SAP_CORE_BC_UI_PER_DSG_PC
• SAP_CORE_BC_UI_PER_USE_PC
• In addition, you need a business role with the respective business authorizations giving you access to the SAP GUI UI you want to adapt, like SAP_BR_SALES_MANAGER in our case

Feedback, Comments, or Questions:

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Also feel invited to post and answer questions here (https://answers.sap.com/tags/270c4f37-c335-46e1-bfad-a256637d5e26).

I want to thank Katrin Polloczek, Krists Magons, Christian Eckenweber,  Yasmina van Rooijand Karsten Schaser for their extremely helpful contributions.