Introduction

As you know in SAP MDG-M you can centrally govern most of the material master related fields and tables through a Change Request supported by a SAP Business Workflow. The used User-Interface within the component “Central Governance” is most of the time based on SAP Web Dynpro and SAP Floorplan Manager.

Many customers introduce SAP MDG to replace processes which are based on SAP GUI transactions such as mm01 or mm02. SAP GUI based User-Interfaces are none browser-based UIs and the displaying is different to the UIs in SAP MDG. I personally think that MDG improves the user experience with its more modern web UIs and I also get the same feedback from various customers.

Nevertheless, many users are used to some nice features from the SAP GUI and sometimes they are not available in SAP FPM UIs. In this Blog I would like to explain one example and give you some hints how to resolve this. By the way: You can use the settings explained in this blog for any other field in SAP MDG as well.

Material Description in SAP GUI and SAP MDG

Info: It depends on your SAP GUI settings regarding the used Theme (in Settings ->Options -> Visual Design) if your SAP GUI behaves as mentioned below.

In SAP GUI the UI to maintain Material Description looks like the following:

Screenshot 1: Typical Material Description in SAP GUI mm01

I the following screenshot I used for the different languages always the same amount of characters (20) but different characters per language to show that the length is always the same. This is mainly dependent on the font family.

Screenshot 2: Test description in SAP GUI to highlight the challenge

In the default (theme) settings of SAP MDG-M this is different because – by default- SAP MDG is using a different theme.

Screenshot 3: Typical Material Description in MDG-M

Screenshot 4: Test description in MDG-M to highlight the challenge

Sometimes this is an issue for the business users because the Material Descriptions are printed on labels later on or used in any other process where a same/strict string length is mandatory.

Solution: How to change the font of the description

One solution to solve this issue is to influence the settings of the input field in the SAP Floorplan Manager. Simplest way is to change the settings (in customizing mode) of the specific field/ List UIBB.

1. Right mouse click on the Material Description UIBB and select “Technical Help…”
2. Popup appears: Click on the link highlighted link
3. Create a customizing for this UIBB
4. Popup appears: Select the column which you want to modify: in this case MAKTX
5. Modify the attribute “Style”
6. Save you settings and test the new settings:

Info:

• You can also define many other displaying settings in the attributes. One example is the color: fontColor:Red
• To define both setting you will separate them by “;” like: fontColor:red;fontFamily:Courier

Regards

Steffen