- SAP Managed Tags:
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):
You can choose an individual UI Control for each characteristic. The following table shows whether single-value or multivalue characteristics (or both) are supported.
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.
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.
Moreover, we have created a configurable material EXAMPLE_CAR containing this characteristic group and its characteristics.
The following screenshot is from the modeling environment:
Testing this model, we can see that the UI elements of all characteristics have been rendered according to our choice on the evaluation screen:
So we can now pick the values we like:
For further information, check the cloud documentation here.
