Personas

I’ve recently been spending some time playing with Personas again.  I commonly get the error:

Flavor “X” is locked by user Mike Piehl (PIEHLM)

Which tends to happen after my browser seizes up and I’m forced to refresh the tab. After a quick search on-line, I found the following information:

1) Start transaction SM12

2) Enter /PERSONAS/FLAVOR as table name. Remove/Replace the default value in field “User name” in case another user locked the flavor.

3) Execute search and delete the Flavor lock on the following screen.

Thanks for reading,

After experimenting with Personas for a while, I realized that I had a huge misconception about Personas.  As I listened to companies talk about Personas and upcoming projects, I assumed they picked Personas because it  didn’t require any development.  Being an application developer, it scared me a bit.  I was afraid that with a bit of work, Personas could replace all the effort I’ve put into my applications.  After playing with it for a bit, I now understand that it absolutely is not the case.

So that led me to the question of why you would pick Personas over just doing your own custom development.  I wanted to share some of the things that will require custom development, even if you pick Personas.

1. If you can’t do something in the standard transaction,you won’t be able to do it with Personas.  For example, I wanted to add a button on the notification screen that would allow me to create an equipment record and then return back to the notification screen.  It’s not possible to this.  The only way you could do it is if you create an RFC to create an equipment record.
2. If you want additional data within a table or a grid, Personas can’t do it.  Personas can only hide columns, never add a new one.  You will need to create your own table/grid to accomplish this.
3. If you want to pull data from multiple sources, your run time could be ugly.  In this event, you don’t NEED to do custom code, but most likely you will want to in order to keep your end users happy.

I’m sure there are other things, but I just wanted to put this out there.  Don’t expect that just using Personas will be a magic bullet.  So if your goal is avoid programming, custom code, custom transactions, etc, don’t expect Personas to do it all for you.  On the flip side, I personally recommend doing a combination.  I think you can make any transaction look better with Personas.  For the first time, you can make SAP screens look like a web screen, without doing a full UI5 or Web Dynpro application (translated to LOTS of TIME and MONEY).  But remember, Personas can only fix what already exists.  So expect to do both to really get to the ultimate user experience.

thanks for reading,

When dealing with Personas, performance is sure to be a huge topic of concern.  Here is are some of the big lessons to keep in mind when trying to get the most out of personas.

1. If you deal with tables or grids, minimize the number of columns using screen variants BEFORE creating your flavor.  The idea is that if you hide all the columns you know you won’t need even before adding a flavor, then less data needs to be sent.  This will improve your tables and grid performance.
2. Minimize fields with drop downs imbedded in the field of a table or grid.  A perfect example in my world is the billing or delivery block on a sales order.  As soon as touch the field, it drops down a list.  With Personas, it appears to replicate the list every time the field shows up.  So if you have a table/grid with that field in 100 rows, it will send 100 lists.  I’m a little fuzzy on this so maybe I misunderstood.  But SAP encourages you to avoid those type of fields in a table/grid, and whenever possible minimize the number of values.
3. When combining tabs, be aware of how much data is moving from one tab to another.  In the screen painting process, Personas will go from tab to tab and manually grab the element, then move it, then move to the next tab and move that.  If you system is fast enough, you might not notice this, but if you look closely enough, you might see some elements showing up ahead of others.  In addition, moving tables/grids is expensive in personas due to the increased amount of data.  It all works, but be cognizant of how much stuff you are moving around and if it’s making your end users wait a lot longer than normal.
4. An obvious on… smaller images are better.  If you can avoid it, don’t use high resolution graphics as these will need to be sent to the browser.  Instead, go smaller, or if you have a complex layering image, find a way to make it a single graphic.  This will cut down on the amount of data the browser has to wait for.
5. Use RFC’s to pull in data whenever possible.  Again, this is more of a common sense suggestion.  Why visit a screen to pull data, when you can run a simple function and pull back the data.  I think of it in terms of a BDC vs. a function in terms of performance.

I’m sure there will be more, but it’s what I’ve found so far.

thanks for reading,

I have been going through the OpenSAP course to see exactly what Personas can do.  After watching the videos, seeing some demos and playing with some of it myself, I wanted to share some of the highlights I’ve found so far.

• One of the coolest things I found in Personas is that once you configure it for the webgui, it also applies to the Windows GUI.  This really opens the door, because you aren’t locked into using the web GUI.
• Having control over the screen look and feel, making buttons into tiles, decent backgrounds, a web look and feel.  As  or my friend Jeff would probably say, it makes SAP not look like crap 🙂
• Combining tabs within a screen is relatively easy.  It’s a bit clunky because it’s essentially do one step, save, exit, change tabs, move elements, and repeat.
• Tables and Grids can move or hide columns, but you cannot add new columns.
• Scripting is very powerful.  It can jump you around screens, tabs, etc.  It can pull data and populate dynamic fields, or even call RFC’s (this makes my creation of the RFC’s for services even more valuable).  Turns out, services are the key to everything going forward with SAP.
• Installation and meeting the pre-requisites is manageable.  The differences in versions can be a pain.  Between kernels, versions, SAP Notes etc.

I have yet to try transporting my flavors or some of the more complicated scripting, but as I try them, I’ll be sure to post my thoughts.

Thanks for reading,

Well, like so many things in SAP, nothing is as straightforward as expected.  In order to finally get Persona’s up and running I had to go through a few iterations of updates.

Step 1.  Update the kernel.  Even this is more challenging than I expected, of course, a lot of it was user error.  ha ha ha.  I learned  I have to pay a lot of attention to make sure that the files I download are in the correct release as well in Unicode, the correct DB, etc.  I got very used to downloading files in the old version of Service.SAP.com.  The new UI5 version certainly looks nicer, but navigating it was a new adventure.

Step 2.  Install personas.  This part was easy 🙂  using SAINT, it was very straightforward.

Step 3.  Perform minor configuration.  Most of this was activating the new services.  For the list, check the oss note:  2222773.  Also, assign your user one of the new Persona authorization roles.  Admin is probably the likely one 🙂

I thought I was good to go here.  Unfortunately, I got nothing.  So I dug deeper into the OSS message, and it referenced a guide.  The guide directed me toward a host of OSS notes that I needed to apply.  Every version is different, so I won’t bother to include all the notes (and of course prerequisites).

Again…  thought I was done after this.  But it turns out if you upgrade your kernel to 742 – 401, then it’s too new for Persona’s, unless you upgrade to SP02 or SP03.  So my final step was to update to SP03.  Finally, I hit paydirt.  I may try this on my old EHP4 system, just to see what happens, but it might be more trouble than it’s worth.

Thanks for reading,

Well, my friend Adeel recently turned me onto Persona’s.  Up until now, I plead ignorance.  I really thought it was just simple screens view-able as web pages.  So, for this reason, I’d pretty much ignored them until now.  After seeing some of the power they have, it’s really left me wondering why anyone would spend all the time doing UI5 (unless you were doing an application that would work 100% remotely).  Even in the short demo I saw, I was able to re-imagine a lot of what I’ve already done with my products…  not to mention easy changes from a consulting standpoint.  Short story, expect to see more about persona’s in the near future.  I’m currently in the process of installing Persona’s 3.0 on my system, and I’m running through an OpenSAP course to give me the basics as well.

If any of your are familiar with Persona’s and could shed some light on the pro’s and con’s, I’d love to hear about it.  I’ll be doing my own experiment soon now that Renovation is converted to the standard Dynpro screen, it will make for the perfect project to convert to Persona’s.

Hey, no matter what, I can add yet another buzz word to my list of skills 🙂

Thanks for reading,