Control the initial order of how tile groups appear for your users in the Fiori Launchpad

The Challenge

The Fiori Launchpad has a great flexbility to allow users the ability to add, move, modify and create their own or existing groups.

However, when you start to get a significant number of tiles appear in your user’s launchpads – there becomes a need to show the more important groups near the top or at the top depending on your business requirements.

One challenge we had was that we wanted some key tile groups to appear at the top of our user’s Launchpads but still allow for the personalisation of these tile groups.  I came up with a few options to see if this problem could be solved with some system configuration.

One attempt was to create fresh test users and assigning security roles containing Fiori Groups in order and saving each time.  Unfortunately this didn’t have any effect but I guess it was worth a try…

A Partial Solution

I found that disabling personalisation would separate the Fiori Launchpad tile groups into the following:

1. Groups which couldn’t be personalised would appear first.
2. Followed by groups which could be personalised. 

The sort order within these groups, I’m not too sure how this behaves – someone can raise a OSS message for me with SAP 🙂 .

Our original business requirement was to get specific tile groups appear at the top of the Fiori Launchpad and retain personalisation.  This wasn’t the exact solution but it was an option if we needed it were we willing to compromise.

Figure 1: Under Fiori Launchpad Administration you can edit groups to disable personalisation which will lock and bring these tile groups to the top of the Fiori Launchpad.

Experimentation with PFCG Menu Options

Before you try this make sure you re-renable personlisation for your tile group!

So using transaction code PFCG in our gateway system hosting Fiori, I went into the Role that contained my tile group I wanted to appear up the top.

1. Open the Menu tab in PFCG and click on “Menu Options”.  Notice my default group under “Role Menu”.

Figure 2: Edit your security role which contains your Fiori Tile Group.

2. Edit and set the “Relative Sorting” fields.  I set my default role to “Home Role” and a sort index of 100, just in case I wanted to add more tile groups to the “Home Role”.

Figure 3: Set the sort index of your Fiori Tile Group role to define sort order in the Fiori Launchpad.

3. Last step is to just quickly check you’ve assigned this role to your user.

So what happened?

Test and verify with my own user ID where I had personalised the nuts out of my Fiori Launchpad

So I reran my launchpad to see if this would change anything and unfortunately it did nothing! 🙁

And then it occurred to me. I had personalised my own personal Fiori Launchpad quite extensively by dragging, dropping, rearranging and shifting groups.  It seem to me that my personalisations maybe overriding the sort index values I had just set.

What if I did this with a brand new user or a user who had not personalised their Fiori launchpad?

Test and verify with different users

Given we wanted our new Fiori users to see these groups up the top I wondered if this would work if I created a fresh user.

I assigned my roles and lo and behold my intended tile group appeared right at the top!  I could also continue to personalise this tile group!

I also checked a test user which we had created months back but didn’t personalise the Fiori Launchpad much and my group appeared at the top of the page.  It worked!

Conclusion and Learnings

The sort index is an option to define your Fiori Tile Group order on the Fiori Launchpad.  However be aware that if you’ve already made significant personlisation to your Fiori Launchpad, these preferences will override the sort index you set in your security role.

I have not tried the sort index with tile groups that cannot be personalised – but it is likely that this same technique would work to order your Fiori tile groups!