How to turn displayed empty space to good use when starting SE80

[BaerbelWinkler]

One of my tasks is to get internal and external developers to read and adhere to our development guidelines which we keep and maintain on an internal and easy to access website. To make them readily available, we implemented logic via an enhancement for Class CL_WB_INITIAL in Method SHOW_CONTROLS which makes the website get directly displayed within SE80 (and SE84).

However, when we recently upgraded to NW 7.50 with EHP8, SE80 no longer displayed the guidelines but just a lot of empty "real estate" under the heading "Welcome to the ABAP Workbench". We found out that a user setting on RSEUMOD (NOBITMAP) had been switched back to the default value during the upgrade and as long as the box for "Display Workbench News" is checked in the user settings all you got is a fairly empty screen:



I then started to look and ask for options of how to put some relevant information on this screen which eventually led to me finding SAP's own help page about tweaking what shows up there.

Here is what I did to display a customized message when SE80 gets called:

• Started out with some trial and error via debugging CL_WB_INITIAL~LOAD_WB_INITIAL_PAGE where the content of internal table HTML_TAB can be updated to simulate different content for the page


• Created an HTML-file based on SAP's content in HTML_TAB to build the actual information I wanted to display on the page.


• Opened that HTML-file in the browser to see how the formatting actually looked like


• Used transaction SMW0 to add an entry for Z_WB_INITIAL_PAGE filled via upload from the HTML-file (this entry needs to be assigned to a package and a transport-request)


• Used transaction SE16 for table SEWB_SETTINGS to add an entry for ATTRIBUTE = WB_NEWS and UNAME = space with VALUE = Z_WB_INITIAL_PAGE (this entry was saved without a prompt for a transport)

As soon as these settings were complete, SE80 came up with the prepared content.

Note: the German "Umlauts" I had in the text needed to be spelled out with their HTML code (e.g. "& ouml ;" for "ö" - just w/o the spaces!) to show up properly from within SE80.

This is how the screen looks like now with some formatting and a link included:

From now on I can use that page to also push important news to developers whenever the need arises - like when there are some changes to the guidelines they need to be aware of. All it takes is uploading another HTML-file via SMW0.

This is obviously just one way to make use of this "real estate" and I'm sure that there are many others. Do you have any other suggestions? If yes, please share them in the comments. Thanks!