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