Favorite List Management Tool

[JerryWang]

• My Favorite List Management guideline


• Pain points for Favorite list organization


• Tool development


• Further reading

My Favorite List Management guideline

In my daily work I like to use Favorite to make my work more efficiently. My personal guideline to management favorite list:

1. The most frequently used tcode which are brief themselves ( e.g SE24, SE38 ) are not put into favorite list.


2. The more frequently used, the upper position it will be in the favorite list. ( as a CRM developer, I am using BSP_WD_CMPWB every day for two years, but I still could not remember it, so I have to put it to favorite ) The less, the lower.


3. I never use nested folder in favorite list.  Suppose I have put one tcode to deeply nested folder "debug tool", then it would take me 4 clicks to launch the tcode. I don't want to waste time on these 4 clicks. So there are no nested folder in my favorite list.

Pain points for Favorite list organization

In my opinion, I don't think the Favorite update functionality in SAP gui is convenient to use.

For example if I want to drag one tcode in the bottom area of the favorite tree and drop it to one upper folder,

I need to press the mouse and scroll up the favorite tree until the destination folder appears in the screen, and then drop the tcode to the folder. The scroll speed is quite low. Or I can delete the original tcode in the bottom, and scroll up to the upper folder, and re-add the tcode into that folder.

So I export the favorite list into a local text file and plan to edit that file locally.

Unfortunately the format of the text file is still not straightforward and difficult for manual change:

1. each line consists of four columns:

a. menu type: TR indicates that it is a transaction code, space means it is a folder

b. object ID: each record must have a unique ID. And the hierarchy relationship between a folder and its wrapped tcode are represented by the ID.

c. tcode technical name

d. tcode description, or folder name

  2. It is necessary to manipulate the object ID on my own if I want to manually change the text file. Special attention must be paid if I need to move a given tcode from one folder to another folder. The corrupt file( wrong object ID ) would prevent you from seeing the favorite list at all. During my attempt, after I uploaded the manually edited text file, I could not use the system any more since there is dump when SAPGUI tries to render the favorite list with corrupt file:

Tool development

So I develop a simple tool which will upload a text file with a new format defined by myself. It only has two columns:

Column1: the first level of favorite list tree. It could be a folder, a tcode( wrapped with "[ ]" ), or a webdynpro application( wrapped with "( )" ).

Column2: the second level of favorite list tree. It must be either a tcode or a webdynpro application. No nested folder is allowed since as I said I do not need nested folder in my daily work at all. The hierarchy relationship between a folder and its wrapped tcode are represented by the Tab key.

After I run the tool to upload the text file, my Favorite list is rendered with exactly the same structure defined in text file.

Benefit of using this tool:

1. It is no need to manipulate object ID any more. The tool will calculate it automatically.


2. No need to maintain the tcode description or webdynpro application description. Just maintain the tcode technical name and the tool will fetch description automatically.


3. The text file itself is very easy to understand. If you need to move a tcode from one folder to another, just do cut & paste in text file.

I just upload my favorite list which contains 290 entries for your reference.

Source code of report could be found from my github.

Further reading

1. If you would like to know where are these tcode from drop down list stored in your laptop, read this document.

2. Some more detail about SAP GUI settings storage could be found in this blog.