ABAP – Using the SCREEN structure

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lately in my development activities I’ve spent a lot of time developing screen.  One of the pieces of our latest product is a high end configuration screen to give the user as much control as they want for the final product.  Now as many of you know, I have no formal ABAP training, but it’s amazing what you can learn from books, the internet, and just good old trial and error.  Well, one of the things I’ve been using a lot is screens.  If you’re a developer, I’m sure this is old hat, but to me this has become invaluable.  In a previous post, I talk about how important it is to be consistent in naming your screen elements.  Today I’m going to step back and talk a little about the SCREEN structure.

For me, some of the big things I wanted to be able to dynamically control is if the element is visible in SE51 and if you can change it.  For this, there are simple fields in the SCREEN structure:

  • Invisible – setting this to 1 make the field disappear from the screen
  • input – setting this to 1 makes the field editable.

Now the big thing to remember is that if you are doing something dynamic, like I’ve done using tables to control the settings, you must lock the changes in.  Locking them in is very simple.  MODIFY SCREEN.  That simple statement, locks your changes in.  If you forget it, you’ll spend a lot of time being frustrated, wondering why the element isn’t behaving like you’re telling it to (believe me, I know this from experience.  ha ha ha).

Thanks for reading,

Mike

As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike

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