Understanding DSM and BRFPlus – the Unified Rendering trap for young players

Possibly my shortest blog ever…

So you are using DSM or BRFPlus for the first time and you are faithfully following the tutorials and wandering through the various screens… and then strange things start to happen?!

Menus disappear as soon as they appear, checkboxes refuse to check on or off, move up/down icons refuse to be grabbed, radio buttons refuse to click, there are strange and peculiar short dumps happen as  you move from one rule object to the next, text boxes are mysteriously resized, all sorts of crazy stuff is happening. WTF?!

What you are experiencing is the joy of Unified Rendering.  Because the DSM workbench and BRFPlus workbench are based on the ABAP WebDynpro protocol, they are susceptible to underlying issues with the ABAP WebDynpro protocol itself.

Now for the good news… !

Nearly always these are problems that have already been solved.  But if you don’t do a lot of ABAP WebDynpro development you may not have heard the term Unified Rendering, and thankfully I am not going to attempt to explain it now either (if you are interested try asking someone in the ABAP forum).

All you need to know is that it’s the Unified Rendering notes for your release and support pack that you need to fix these bizarre behaviours.

You can find the Unified Rendering notes in SAP’s support site http://support.sap.com/notes  just search for the term Unified Rendering with your release and support pack.

How do you know which release and support pack? Logon to your system using SAP Logon and go to the menu option System > Status then use the magnifying glass icon under Component Version to find the component SAP_UI.  It should look something like this- the first number is the release and the second is the support pack.

These Unified Rendering notes come as a set of anywhere between 2 and 20 notes per release/support pack. In SAP’s support site the matching notes will look something like this.

What you want to do is to apply ALL of the Unified Rendering notes that match your release and support pack.  Just apply them all in the order specified (I before Ia before Ib, II before III, etc.)  – don’t do them piecemeal and don’t skip any, otherwise who knows which of those weird and wonderful behaviours will remain?

And don’t forget… let the Basis/Admin folk know… anytime they patch the SAP_UI component to a new release/support pack level, just grab the Unified Rendering notes for the new release/support pack level and apply them.

This is one time when prevention is definitely infinitely preferable to the cure. Fixing broken rule objects is not something any of us have a lot of time for.

So get your Unified Rendering notes now… and save yourself from the trap of Unified Rendering issues.