Right, I installed the latest and greatest tools from SAP last week, and I ran into a load of trouble.

Step by step, I managed to sort most of them out, but for those that are still struggling, let me list some of the issues I encountered and how I fixed them

SAPLogon.ini

It all starts here. You’ve just installed the new SAPGUI 7.40, and gone are all your system connections. very annoying…

Here’s how to fix it:

It all starts in your SAPGUI configuration. You need to know where your config files are stored.

Go to your windows explorer and navigate to this folder. You’ll see some files there. These are the ones you need:

When you launch your SAPLogon, an automatic migration will happen from your SapLogonTree.xml (which may refer to saplogon.ini and shorcuts.ini)

In case you have multiple saplogon.ini files, you can hook them up in your SapLogonTree.xml and they will be migrated as well.

<Files>

<File type="Connections" name="saplogon.ini"/>

<File type="Shortcuts" name="sapshortcut.ini"/>

</Files>

That migration program will create 2 new files:

In some cases all of this fails and the SAPUILandscape.xml stays empty. Arf.

In such cases, you can launch the NWBC 5.0 and restart the migration from there.

(Keep the CTRL key pressed down while you click through the menu)

Be sure to select the right view in both your NWBC and your SAPLogon as the tree is structured differently from what it used to be.

In NWBC you can select the workspace to work in

In SAPLogon, you can change the view

NWBC navigation tree

Getting strange error messages on your NWBC navigation tree?

Those have to do with your menu selection. Typically in the NWBC, you’ll want to see your specific user menu, rather than the general SAP Menu.

Normally the user menu is defaulted, but if you’re like me, and you click on everything, you may have turned it off.

Here’s how to fix it:

From the NWBC menu, you can go to settings->personalization and make sure the SAP Menu is unchecked.

Blue crystal theme in SAPGUI

Don’t use it, yet. [update: PS, this is fixed since a while (a big while) and the blue crystal theme does look better than Corbu, so switch]

Some buttons and screen areas tend to disappear in this new theme.

Take transaction PFCG for example. If I want to add a folder as a sidepanel, I can’t see the button for extra node options any more.

These guys:

Don’t appear anymore in Blue_crystal

So do yourself a favor, and wait until some patches appear.

Passwords in shortcuts

I know, this is a bad practice, but if you have 300 systems in your SAPLogon like me, it’s an easy solution.

Which, BTW, no longer works. You can still enter your password in the shortcut, but after a restart of the SAPLogon, they are removed.

Here’s how to overcome that issue:

In the sapuiLandscape.xml file, you can manually add your passwords for each shortcut with the addition passwd=”<pass>”.

Obviously, this creates a securiy risk, so I don’t advise it.

To prevent loss of your password entries, just make the file read-only.

[Edit] Don’t make the SAPUILandscape.xml file readonly. While it will still work for you initially, at some point in time, NWBC is going to make a backup of the file, and if it can’t access it’s own backups, it won’t start at all!

To figure this out, look into the logs: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\SAP\NWBC\Traces

In earlier saplogons, I had an option to encrypt the password. (making it at least a little bit safer) That option doesn’t seem to work on the new XML file 🙁

On the upside, if you create NWBC entries for all your systems, you can have your browser remember the passwords 🙂

Duplicated NWBC entries

You may have experienced that your NWBC logon entries (so not the SAPGUI logon entries, but the specific NWBC entries) get duplicated every time you launch the NWBC. At least I have. Which is really annoying, cause it makes your NWBC go slower and slower on each launch.

And after about 20 relaunches, you get a massive SAPUILandscape XML file and neither your NWBC, nor your saplogon will start anymore.

the only solution is to delete the NWBCOptions.XML and NWBCOptions.BAK and to clean out your SAPUILANDSCAPE.XML file of all NWBC entries. (that’s why I keep a backup of that file)

The reason for this is simple. Every time you launch the NWBC, it executes the migration tool. But there seems to be a bug in there which causes it to migrate every NWBC entry which is not located in the root of your workspaces again, and again, and again,…

Solution: open up your registry editor and find following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER –> Software –> SAP –> NWBC –> Settings –> LShape –> DontUseSapGuiMigrationTool

and set it to True.

That should stop the NWBC from migrating your NWBC entries all the time. At least it did for me.

Update:

There is a new patch available for NWBC 5.0

Patch Level 4, which again fixes some quirks:

– The annoying mouse cursor

– The instance id that always got reset to 00 now stays remembered when you change it

– No more duplicating of histoic NWBC entries (at least not for me)

the Password addition in shortcuts doesn’t seem to work anymore, at all. not in SAPGUI, not in NWBC and it ignores the regedit entry to store passwords completely.

The best alternative I have to offer, is by using the NWBC for what it’s intended:

connect to the NWBC service of your SAP system.

Logon goes via HTTPS in browser

let the browser remember your password.

Update 2:

PL5 for NWBC was released a couple of weeks back.

More info was released of the transition role of NWBC

Launch error

I noticed a strange quirk with a fresh NWBC installation on the Laptop of one of my colleagues. For some reason, the darn thing wouldn’t start. the splash screen would show for half a second, and then everything disappeared again. There were some errors in the logging with regards to the .Net framework (which was fine by the way)

The solution turned out to be: Launch the NWBC once via the NWBCCore.exe

After that, the regular shortcut worked just fine.