Screen Personas in CE2608 introduces enhancements that make it easier to reuse existing flavors and deliver optimized user experiences across specialized devices.
Two capabilities stand out:
- Copy a Flavor to Multiple Target Flavors
- Option to Define Custom Industrial Device Types
Together, these enhancements help organizations reduce flavor development effort, improve consistency, and better support specialized hardware used in industrial environments.
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Copy a Flavor to Multiple Target Flavors
Managing multiple flavors that share a common layout can often involve repetitive work. This is now simplified by enhancing the existing “Copy to Application ID” functionality and renaming it to “Copy to Application ID or Flavor ID.”
With this enhancement, administrators can copy a source flavor to an existing target flavor. More importantly, the same source flavor can be copied to multiple target flavors in a single operation, provided that the screen ID and Program Name matches the target flavors.
Why Is This Useful?
Consider a business scenario where you already have a Manage flavor and need similar Display and Create flavors.
Instead of building the Display and Create flavors from scratch, you can:
- Start with the existing Manage flavor as the source.
- Copy it to the target flavors.
- Make only the required modifications.
This approach promotes consistency across flavors while significantly reducing development and maintenance effort.
Prerequisites
The following conditions apply:
- The user must have the Personas Administrator role.
- Target flavors must already exist. They can be empty or contain existing changes.
- The source flavor must not contain an adaptive stack.
- The screen ID and Program Name of the source flavor must match the target flavors.
Additional Option for BDT Application Flavors
CE2608 also introduces an option specifically useful for BDT (Business Data Toolset) application flavors.
BDT transactions can have similar detail screens while using different entry screens. In such scenarios, administrators can choose to skip entry-screen changes during the copy operation.
This makes it possible to reuse the relevant flavor changes while preserving the target transaction’s existing initial-screen behavior.
Key Benefit
This enhancement transforms flavor copying from a one-to-one activity into a more efficient mass flavor reuse mechanism, making it particularly valuable in environments with many similar flavors. It also enables users to work on a new flavor and subsequently overwrite or replace an existing flavor without impacting its existing sharing configurations, eliminating the need to reconfigure sharing settings.
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Option to Define Custom Industrial Device Types
SAP Screen Personas already supports adaptive flavors that are created based on the dimensions and characteristics of the target device.
With CE2608, this capability becomes significantly more flexible.
Previously, the available device list was static and maintained by SAP. With CE2608, administrators can now define and register their own custom devices for adaptive flavor creation.
Why Do Custom Devices Matter?
Industrial organizations often use specialized hardware that does not correspond to standard consumer devices.
Examples include:
- Rugged handheld terminals
- Industrial tablets
- Warehouse scanners
- Shop-floor devices
- Specialized company-specific hardware
These devices can have unique screen dimensions and pixel densities. A flavor optimized for a standard desktop or tablet may not provide the best experience on such hardware.
CE2608 addresses this by allowing administrators to define custom devices and specify attributes such as:
- Device width
- Device height
- Pixel ratio
These parameters are then used to define an adaptive flavor for the custom device.
Creating Adaptive Flavors for Custom Devices
Once a custom device has been registered by the administrator, it becomes available in the device selection list when creating an adaptive flavor.
This allows flavor designers to explicitly design and optimize the user experience for the organization’s actual hardware landscape.
Key Benefits
Better Support for Industrial Scenarios
Organizations can optimize SAP GUI experiences for rugged devices, scanners, industrial tablets, and other specialized hardware.
Improved Responsive Behavior
Device-specific width, height, and pixel-ratio information allows adaptive flavors to be rendered appropriately for the target hardware.
Greater Flexibility
Organizations are no longer limited to the predefined device list when designing adaptive flavors.
Conclusion
Screen Personas in CE2608 makes flavor management more scalable and adaptive.
The ability to copy one flavor to multiple target flavors reduces repetitive configuration and encourages reuse. At the same time, custom industrial device support extends adaptive flavors beyond SAP’s predefined device list, allowing organizations to optimize classic SAP applications for their specific hardware environments.
For organizations managing large flavor landscapes or supporting specialized industrial devices, these enhancements can translate into less development effort, greater consistency, and a better user experience.
- Online training. The best way to learn the basics about SAP Screen Personas (Adapt UI for classic applications) is to take our free training course on the learning.sap.com platform: https://learning.sap.com/courses/adapting-the-ui-in-sap-s-4hana-cloud-using-sap-screen-personas
- Connect with your peers. Every other month, we have a group of customers that gather online to share best practices, demo their flavors, and answer each other’s questions. Experts from the product team also join to explain how to use the latest functionality. If you are interested in joining, you can sign up online to join the SAP Screen Personas practitioner forum. This will add you to the mailing list for the monthly meeting summaries. Please contact “Peter Spielvogel“ or me directly if you want to join the monthly calls.
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Product documentation. The SAP Screen Personas documentation, provides more clear , comprehensive and the latest information about the product.
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