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florian_soe
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
1,427

SAP S/4HANA for Advanced Variant Configuration (AVC) offers you a wide variety of features to manage your configurable products. Characteristics come into play as a means to handle the parts of a configurable product. By selecting characteristic values – and thus implicitly triggering the magic of object dependencies – users of the configuration decide what the finished configured product looks like.

As of S/4HANA Cloud 2308.4 (HFC11), you can determine the look and feel of UI widgets for characteristics in the blink of an eye. You can make characteristic values selectable on the screen via radio buttons, dropdown lists, checkboxes, and input fields. This is a new way to create UI input control types right out of the box without coding. It’s an addition to the possibility of creating a full-blown individual UI design to visualize characteristics with UI extensions (link to documentation).

 

Use

Within the app Manage Characteristic Groups (link to documentation), you can create a group of related characteristics or use an existing one. Make sure that the column UI Control is visible in your characteristics table. You can manage this in the view settings (accessible via the cog wheel on the top right):

Cog_wheel.png

 

Column_selection.png

You can choose an individual UI Control for each characteristic. The following table shows whether single-value or multivalue characteristics (or both) are supported.

Yes-No_Table.png

 

Example

We use a simplified car configuration as an example to demonstrate the use of UI input control types. Suppose we have created five characteristics bundled in the characteristic group CG_EXAMPLE_CAR. Now, we choose suitable UI controls for each of them. The pre-selected value is ‘Default,’ delivering the usual look and feel.

Entering_Types_Default.png

 

It’s not difficult to find the proper UI controls. For example, you can only choose one value for the engine power – so a radio button is a good choice. But when you consider the car's extra features, it’s clear that several ones can be selected simultaneously. That’s why the checkbox type comes in handy here.

All_widgets_assigned.png

Moreover, we have created a configurable material EXAMPLE_CAR containing this characteristic group and its characteristics.

The following screenshot is from the modeling environment:

PMEVC_Cstic_Groups.png

 

Testing this model, we can see that the UI elements of all characteristics have been rendered according to our choice on the evaluation screen:

Evaluation_screen_no_selection.png

So we can now pick the values we like:

Evaluation_screen_w_selection.png

 For further information, check the cloud documentation here.

 

 

3 Comments
apisciotta
Explorer
0 Kudos

Hello Florian,

 

thanks for the detailed explanation!

Is the UI Control column available only on S4/Hana Public Cloud releases? I am working on a S4/Hana On-Premise 2023 release (currently the latest one), but I don't actually see the UI control column in the Manage Characteristic Groups app.

That leaves only the UI Extension option available for us, which is nice, but it is very time consuming and extremely technical, especially if you only have to set multivaluted checkbox or radiobuttons instead of an ugly text field.

Is it possible somehow to enable the UI Control column also on other updated S4/Hana releases?

Thanks for your help! Antonino

florian_soe
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

Hi Antonino,

The UI control column will be available only as of OP release 2025 (October 08). Until then, it's only available in S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

I'm happy my explanation was helpful for you!

Best Regards,

Florian

apisciotta
Explorer
0 Kudos

Thank you Florian for your feedback! Even just knowing that for now it is not possible to have this feature on the other releases is very helpful for us.

We will stick with UI Extensions for the time being (which by the way work perfectly!).

Best!

Antonino