The following blog is written by Matt Mantooth – Education Consultant in the North America SAP Education Delivery Organization. Matt specializes in the areas of SAP CRM, SAP NetWeaver Application Server, SAP ECC, SAP ERP HCM, and SAP NetWeaver BW. He has more than eight years of SAP CRM and technical consulting experience. Matt holds an SAP CRM 7.0 associate level certification and a bachelor’s degree in information systems from the University of Alabama, Birmingham. You can contact Matt via email at matt.mantooth@sap.com.
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When customizing navigation bar elements of the SAP CRM Web UI it is crucial to establish the link between the views that you want to provide your users access to and the links that take them there. You can establish this connection easily with standard links of type:Link which are used to provide access to standard views of the SAP CRM application. The same scenario applies to Work Center pages. This information will provide a customizer or technical analyst the ability trace out the specific views that business users are going to encounter making it simpler to understand where potential enhancements or configuration changes would need to be made.
On the left side of Figure 1 is the Create Corporate Account link in the standard service professional business role delivered by SAP. On the right side of Figure 1 is the inbound plug of the window to which the link ultimately points.
Where exactly is this taking me??? |
Figure 1 Clicking a link in the CRM WebClient UI
The first step for discovering exactly where the link is taking you is to identify the Navigation Bar Profile in use by following menu path IMG > Customer Relationship Management > UI Framework > Business Roles > Define Business Roles (Figure 2).
Figure 2 Screen in which you can define a business role
Look at the navigation bar profile that is assigned by following menu path Customer Relationship Management > UI Framework > Technical Role Definition – Define Nav Bar Profile (Figure 3). Taking the value of the Nav Bar Profile from Figure 2, highlight the entry from the Define Profile table in Figure 3 and choose the subfolder below.
Figure 3 List of the defined Nav Bar Profiles in the demo system
Next, identify a work center that you want to examine more closely, which in this example is Accounts & Products (Figure 4). Double click the subfolder to view the details.
Figure 4 Review the details behind the profile you selected
Identify the Work Center ID of the Accounts and Products Work Center and then double click the folder from the dialog structure called Define Work Center. Select the value of your Work Center by choosing the box to the left of the Work Center ID and choose the subfolder Assign Groups by double clicking. Look in the Work Centers definition to see which Work Center link groups have been assigned (Figure 5).
Figure 5 Review the assigned Work Center link groups
Notice in Figure 5 that a logical link ID is assigned to the Work Center. You could use this logical link to look up exactly which component view the link takes you to. However, in this article we are going to take it one step further and find a particular link within the Work Center page. Navigate to the Assign Groups folder under the Dialog Structure on the left side of the screen for the selected work center (Figure 6). In my demo, I have chosen to highlight the Work Center Accounts & Products, but the same method works for any Work Center or link.
Figure 6 List of assigned Work Center link groups for the standard Work Center Accounts & Products
Identify a group that you want to examine closer; I have chosen to examine Group ID MD-BP-CR in this case. Using the value of the Group ID, proceed to the Define Work Center Link Groups folder shown in (Figure 7) and double click to see the list of defined Work Center Link Groups.
Figure 7 Select the group to review
Next, open the assigned links folder to see which links are provided to users by way of the group (Figure 8).
Figure 8 Links in the MD-BP-CR group
Identify a link you want to examine more closely, such as MD-ACC-CR in this example. Now proceed to the Define Logical Links table by double clicking on the folder called Define Logical Links folder (Figure 9) and identify the logical link that you want to examine.
Figure 9 List of logical links
Open the details of the link by highlighting one of the logical links and choosing the magnifying glass icon from the toolbar. In this case, I look at the details of the MD-ACC-CR link (Figure 10).
Figure 10 Details behind MD-ACC-CR logical link
Choose the search help by pressing the F4 key on your keyboard while placing the cursor next to the Target ID field to identify in which component this target is defined (Figure 11).
Figure 11 The search of the Target ID within the defined logical link reveals which component and window the Target ID refers to.
In this case, the component name BP_HEAD_MAIN is where the Target ID (inbound plug) is defined. Note the definition of the Target ID in question. Using the value of the component name and window name, you can now proceed to the component repository to identify the specific view that this Target ID refers to. The location of the component repository in the IMG is shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12 Location of the Work Area Componet Repository in the IMG
Chooosing the IMG activity icon next to Define Work Area Component Repository takes you to the table shown in Figure 13. I have highlighted the entry that corresponds with the identified Target ID from Figure 11 called BP_HEAD_MAIN.
Figure 13 List of the defined components in the Work Area Component Repository
Next, go into the Component Definition > Inbound Plug folder in the Dialog Structure for BP_HEAD_MAIN (Figure 14). This points you to the object type for a corporate account and uses the object action Create.
Figure 14 The definition of the Target ID
In Figure 14, you can see a list of all of the Target IDs that are defined for a selected component. Each of the Target IDs refers to an inbound plug of a particular component and identifies what activity mode the Target ID will perform (e.g., create, search, or display). For more information on the inbound plug, you can now go to the component definition in the Component Workbench (Figure 15). Use the value of the component name from the component repository to look up the details of each inbound plug definition for the selected component. In this example, the component name is BP_HEAD_MAIN.
Figure 15 The RT Rep Details of Window screen showing all of the navigation options for the selected component BP_HEAD_MAIN
You now have the steps necessary to trace down logical links within the CRM Web UI. To continue your training in similar topics as this, please refer to SAP Education's CRM User Interface course (CR580). Contact our Customer Interaction Center about CR580 or any SAP Education course at 1-888-777-1727 or email education.northamerica@sap.com.
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