Introduction

Compared to my last blog, today something … serious 🙂 Lately, I’ve read the blog of Lars Hvam about open sourcing ABAP code. I looked at abapGit, a great tool, quite powerful possibilities to work together – many thanks to him!

Here is my answer to his request. Hope that most of you can make use of it, share their thoughts and contribute some ideas.

Description

My topic revealed what it’s all about. If you work with more than one system or more than one client, you sometimes miss the possibility to “synchronize” your SAP GUI favorites between them automatically. Thus I had the idea to write a small tool for doing that. After a little research, I decided on following solution.

First of all, the tool works with frontend files so there is no need that systems and clients are connected. Trigger for download and upload is the start transaction set in SAP Easy Access menue. The favorites of a system/client combination which are read from a file are stored in a favorite folder named “<system id>-<client>” of the client where the tool is executed. Here is an example:

You see, we don’t have a “real” synchronisation but favorites are available in a subfolder. Furthermore you can still set a transaction or report to start automatically after login (with variant for both options). The tool is open for enhancements. Have a look at the method “RUN” of local class “LCL_DOWNLOAD_AND_UPLOAD”.

Installation

Before installation, please pay attention to the license. Additionally, please note that the tool is still under construction and test. As Lars Hvam wrote: “it does not have to work” 🙂 There are a lot of tests to do. Consider it as a SAP Community Network beta. Especially, observe your entries in database table “SMEM_BUFFC”.

I tried not to use latest ABAP statements so that most of you should be able to test. Please help and give feedback in which system and software constellation it works (or not …). I worked with a SAP Netweaver 7.51. If you find an error, fix it and publish your source code or report the error by using issue tracking of GitHub.

Installation with abapGit

At first you have to install abapGit. Have a look at the installation documentation. After that check this documentation to load the development objects from the repository “https://github.com/Keller-Michael/synchronize-SAP-GUI-favorites” into your system.

Manual installation

If you can’t use abapGit for whatever reason, check the repository “https://github.com/Keller-Michael/synchronize-SAP-GUI-favorites” manually. Copy the content of the following files as described:

• zdownload_upload_setup.prog.abap -> report ZDOWNLOAD_UPLOAD_SETUP
• zdownload_upload_autostart.prog.abap -> report ZDOWNLOAD_UPLOAD_AUTOSTART

Create two transaction codes:

• report ZDOWNLOAD_UPLOAD_SETUP -> tcode ZDOWN_UP_SETUP
• report ZDOWNLOAD_UPLOAD_AUTOSTART -> tcode ZDOWN_UP_AUTOSTART
  

Configuration

Call transaction code “ZDOWN_UP_SETUP” and configure a personal variant. As variant name use your user’s name. So the variant can be found automatically afterwards. Set transaction code “ZDOWN_UP_AUTOSTART” as start transaction. Log off and on again. Check if your favorites are stored in a file. That file can be used to import in another client or system by the tool.