Proposal search for input fields

[pepl]

HI mates!

Actually this is my first blog in my 5+ years SAP career so don't judge me strictly.

So I have chosen really intersting topic: probably something that everyone thought about. I'm sure someone even tried to implement this feature by own efforts.

This is a proposal search feature. This is so obvious that if we type the beginning of the search term or even mask we want to see the results instantly. But not in SAP GUI. All the times we had to press F4 or at least click at search button by mouse.

But this morning while creating a new search help I suddenly noticed an  interesting new block in SE11 transaction.

According to F4 search help I found the following note:

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1861491

The requirements for that feature is quite high: These functions are available as of SAP NetWeaver for ABAP 7.4 SP03 and SAP GUI for Windows 7.30 patch level 5 or higher. But happily we have SP04 so I decided to go further and to try it.

I have selected search helps from DD30L table by AUTOSUGGEST = 'X' field. Hopefully there were results and I have chosen SDSH_SPFLI as an example to try.

From the where-used list of the following search help i found SDSH_S_SPFLI structure and created a tiny program following the instructions from the mentioned above note:

report ztest_autosuggest.

parameters:

  p_carrid TYPE SDSH_S_SPFLI-carrier_id.

at selection-screen output.

  loop at screen.

    if screen-input eq 1.

      cl_dsh_dynpro_properties=>enable_type_ahead(

        exporting

          fields    = value #( ( |{ screen-name }| ) )

          overwrite = abap_false ).

    endif.

  endloop.

The result on the screen made me really enjoyed. Now we have it as a standard feature:

As I understood only since SP06 this feature is going to be activated automatically. So this cl_dsh_dynpro_properties should be called manually in lower versions.

Also I would mention that it's possible only search by code. The full text fuzzy search is available only for special databases like SAP HANA as well,

But in anyway that's something interesting!

So thanks for reading!

Enjoy!