SAP GUI for Windows 7.70: New Features & Lifecycle Information

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Update: Support for SAP GUI for Windows 7.70 ended on 9th of April 2024!

Hello Community,

as mentioned in SAP Note 147519, the shipment date for SAP GUI for Windows 7.70 is the 29th of January 2021. So, we are only 2 days away from the delivery!

With this Blog I would like to provide some general information on the lifecycle of this release as well as information on the new features coming with 7.70. Since the new features contained in 7.70 are quite complex compared to previous releases, I also mention additional prerequisites and potential consequences of each feature.

Our focus areas were:

• New Fiori 3 theme family ("Quartz") - for a harmonized look with other SAP UI frameworks, but you will see that Quartz is not just some new colors.

• Edge (based on Chromium) as alternative browser control for use in the SAP GUI HTML Control - for becoming independent of the Internet Explorer Control

• 64bit versions of NWRFC controls - for being able to use those controls also from 64bit processes like Microsoft Excel 64bit

• Multi-Monitor-Scaling support - for correct display of SAP GUI in environments with multiple monitors using different scaling settings

All of these areas have been eagerly expected by several customers and required huge effort on SAP GUI side. However, in addition to these topics we could also work on a couple of other smaller topics that are explained below.

SAP GUI Lifecycle

SAP GUI for Windows 7.70 was created with Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 which is in mainstream support by Microsoft until 9th of April 2024 (see also https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/lifecycle/products/visual-studio-2019).

Therefore, SAP GUI for Windows 7.70 is supported until 9th of April 2024.

The chart below shows the current dates (on 27th of January 2019) for the lifecycle of SAP GUI for Windows releases 7.50 (already out of support) up to 7.70. For the latest information always refer to SAP Note 147519.

SAP GUI Lifecycle

As you can see in the image above, there is an overlap of support durations for releases 7.60 and 7.70 of about 14 months. During this timeframe patches for both releases will be supplied normally.

New Features in Release 7.70

• New visual theme family "Quartz"

The successor to the Belize theme is the Quartz (Fiori 3.0) theme. For the first time we also offer a dark version of the theme that can be used by users who prefer a dark background.
There are four Quartz Themes (see also image above):

• Quartz ("Light")

• Quartz High Contrast White

• Quartz High Contrast Black

• Quartz Dark

When you install SAP GUI for Windows 7.70, Quartz is the default theme and SAP GUI will choose either the light or the dark version depending on your Windows settings. Of course, we do not override a previous setting - you can continue using SAP GUI with the theme of your choice. We also did not remove any old themes in release 7.70.

Some of the highlights of the Quartz Themes:

• Fiori features (for SAP S/4HANA systems) are supported just like in Belize

• All features of Belize themes including theme specific coloring are supported

• New states like a hover on selected state for several UI elements are introduced

• Improved contrast for many aspects of the UI (including also for selected items)

• A new monospaced font ("72 monospace") is used which suits the proportional font ("72") much better (also for Belize themes)

• The main menu is back by default (also for Belize themes)

• The new ABAP Editor can also use theme specific colors (if a new option is activated)

The feedback we have received so far on the Quartz Themes (also from the Beta program that we ran) is much better than the feedback related to Belize. However, one should keep in mind these SAP Notes when using Quartz Dark:

• SAP Note 2930005: Some ABAP applications use the SAP GUI background colors, but not the SAP GUI font colors for content in HTML controls. In such cases, the application will display dark text on dark background. To solve this, corrections in the respective application are needed.

• SAP Note 2981918: SAP GUI for Windows is re-using several UI elements provided by Windows. Some of these elements do not allow changing their background color - they simply expect that the background is bright (except when High Contrast themes are used in Windows). It proved very difficult to overwrite all these elements and until today some very minor issues are remaining which are listed in this SAP Note.

• Edge (WebView2 Control) as alternative browser control

So far the SAP GUI HTML Control always uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer Control for hosting HTML content inside SAP GUI, but nowadays Internet Explorer has several disadvantages:

• Modern web content may not work

• Performance issues

• Many users have moved to other browsers and want to use them also when working with SAP GUI

• Some web-based SAP UI frameworks intend to stop support for Internet Explorer

• There is a lot of confusion regarding the support lifecycle of Internet Explorer (even though Microsoft has not announced the end of life, yet)

For all these reasons as of release 7.70 we have integrated the Microsoft WebView2 control (Edge based on Chromium) as an alternative to the Internet Explorer Control (see SAP Note 2913405 for more information). In order to allow a smooth patching and update process we have decided not to deploy the component ourselves - therefore, WebView2 is not contained in the SAP GUI installation. To use the new version of the HTML Control, you need to install the Microsoft WebView2 control (https://developer.microsoft.com/en-US/microsoft-edge/webview2/#download-section) separately. Updates to the component are then received via the regular Microsoft channels.

Since the HTML Control based on WebView2 is very new and presently has some functional restrictions (see below), we decided to keep the Internet Explorer Control as the default browser control in SAP GUI for Windows for now. However, once installed, you can select "Edge (based on Chromium)" via a setting in SAP GUI options dialog:

SAP GUI Options Dialog Setting for WebView2

Once the setting is activated, the HTML Control will use the WebView2 Control and therefore offer a modern browsing experience with all the advantages of a current browser:

SAP GUI HTML Control using WebView2

The HTML Control based on Edge behaves like the HTML Control based on Internet Explorer with some technical differences:

• Web content which is not compatible with Microsoft Edge / Google Chrome is obviously not compatible with the new HTML Control. If you are using this kind of content, you should migrate this to new HTML standards. See also SAP Note 2901278.

• The WebView2 control does not take the default font settings for web pages which do not set a font from the Microsoft Edge browser (as opposed to the Internet Explorer control). Therefore, by default, the SAP GUI HTML Control based on WebView2 uses the proportional font set in the SAP GUI options dialog in this case. See SAP Note 2942740 for more information.

• Furthermore, there are some differences between Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Internet Explorer which are intended by Microsoft. For example, when SAP GUI detaches a URL from an HTML Control inside SAP GUI, an external browser window opens. In case of Internet Explorer, this window offers a full navigation bar, but Edge does not offer a navigation bar.

To allow a "mixed-mode" while applications still using old HTML content migrate to something new, we have introduced the feature explained in SAP Note 2957665: The administrator can define a fallback to Internet Explorer for certain systems / transactions when WebView2 is configured to be the default browser control.

• 64bit versions of NWRFC controls
  The SAP GUI shipment includes four controls which can be used for getting data from an SAP System without using SAP GUI:
  
  
  • Logon Control
  
  
  • Function Control
  
  
  • BAPI Control
  
  
  • Table Factory Control
  
  
  

Up to release 7.60 these controls are only available as 32bit versions. Especially with the stronger usage of Microsoft Office 64bit editions this has become a challenge, because 32bit controls cannot be easily invoked from a 64bit process.

As of release 7.70 we offer 64bit versions (both non-Unicode as well as Unicode) of these controls which can be installed in parallel to the 32bit versions. With this, scripts using these controls can also be run from 64bit processes like Microsoft Office 64bit. To benefit from this, select the appropriate installation component to be part of your installation package. See also SAP Note 2724656.

SAP GUI Installation showing the component for getting the 64bit RFC controls

• Multi-Monitor-Scaling support

Up to release 7.60 SAP GUI supports scaling using the scaling settings of the primary monitor only. For other monitors we let the operating system scale the SAP GUI window. This has some drawbacks for example when SAP GUI is embedded in an application which is multi-monitor scaling aware. In case of SAP Business Client this just leads to a blurry display of SAP GUI, but when embedded in Microsoft Internet Explorer the dimensions of SAP GUI inside Internet Explorer are determined incorrectly. See SAP Note 2541592 for more information.

As of release 7.70 multi-monitor scaling can be activated in the SAP GUI options dialog so that the issues with multiple monitor setups using different scaling settings are solved. The feature can be activated for Belize and Quartz themes if a sufficiently new Windows version is used via this setting:

SAP GUI Setting for activating Multi Monitor Scaling

Multi Monitor Scaling is an extremely complex topic that required a multitude of changes in SAP GUI and that will certainly require further changes - the topic may also require adjustments in external ActiveX components that you embed in SAP GUI. SAP Note 2985351 contains further information on this topic.

Another frequent issue in the context of using SAP GUI on devices with high resolutions is an incorrect size of cells in splitter containers. This typically leads to buttons not being completely displayed (cut off). The root cause of these issues is explained in SAP Note 2767962 - the affected ABAP applications are typically defining the height (or width) of the cells in the splitter container without taking the scaling into account.

• Overflow for buttons in the footer of dialog boxes (popups)

The maximum width of a dialog box (popup) is limited by the horizontal resolution of the display. When an application inserts many buttons or wide buttons in the application toolbar (footer) of a dialog box or the resolution is low or the used font size is big, this sometimes exceeds the maximum width. In SAP GUI releases up to release 7.60, such buttons could not be displayed.

Therefore, as of SAP GUI for Windows 7.70 and starting with Belize themes, SAP GUI puts all buttons which do not fit into the dialog box into an overflow button. If needed, the footer of the dialog box displays a button "..." that offers a context menu containing all buttons for which not enough space was available. This ensures that all applications, even those with many wide buttons, can be properly used.

Overflow for buttons in dialog boxes

• Customizable focus position in ALV Grid control

The ALV Grid control may consist out of a toolbar area, title area, column header and table area. If you move the focus to the ALV Grid control via keyboard, in SAP GUI for Windows the focus by default is set to the table area. This is since in many cases the user first wants to do something in the table area (like selecting a column) before using the buttons in the toolbar area (like for sorting the selected column). However, in case a different behavior is desired, this can now be achieved by setting a newly introduced registry value. You can decide whether the focus shall first move to the table area (default), to the toolbar area (value = 1) or column header (value = 2).
See SAP Note 2973107 for more information.

• Different background colors for hierarchical levels in tree control

In SAP Signature Theme the tree control shows different background colors for the first four hierarchical levels. In newer themes this functionality was removed by design, because it reduces contrast of text to background and the idea of the newer SAP GUI themes was having a display with fewer visual hierarchies. However, the different colors for tree levels are considered helpful by some users, because one can more easily understand on which level an item / node in the tree is located.

Therefore, as of SAP GUI for Windows 7.70, we have introduced different background colors to differentiate tree control hierarchical levels also in newer SAP GUI themes starting with Blue Crystal theme (which excludes the Corbu theme). This functionality is inactive by default and can be activated as explained in SAP Note 2943146. For SAP Signature Theme the functionality remains active by default and cannot be deactivated. Please note that in High Contrast themes this functionality is not supported, because the contrast wouldn't be enough to meet the minimum contrast requirements.

Tree Level Colors in Quartz, Quartz Dark, Belize and Blue Crystal Themes

• Improved version of SAP GUI Scripting “Record and Playback” dialog

SAP GUI scripting offers a dialog for recording and replaying scripts. This dialog had several functional and usability issues. Therefore, it has been reworked in release 7.70 and the following changes were applied:

• The dialog is substantially larger, because it has been restructured with sections specific to recording and replaying. The "More / Less" button available in previous releases is no longer available.

• The dialog is no longer topmost by default. If desired, the dialog can be made topmost again by setting a registry value

• The dialog remembers the previous position at which it was closed. Therefore, you can move the dialog to a convenient position (or even a secondary monitor) while recording.

• The dialog offers a new button for editing the recorded script in a text editor associated with the respective file extension.

• When replaying a script, the dialog no longer asks for a file to be replayed, but uses the file specified in the respective input field. The name of the file recorded last is automatically taken over into the input field after completing the recording.

• The usability has been improved (tabchain, focus, scaling,...)

• The dialog can be launched or brought to the front if it was already started before by clicking the scripting indicator in the system information area in the SAP GUI main window or the SAP Business Client main window. This function can only be used if scripting is installed and permitted in the system you are connected to.

• SAP Business Client Integration: User timeout

SAP GUI for Windows and SAP Business Client now exchange information on whether a user is still active to avoid timeouts when the user is still active in another window / tab.

• Placeholder characters in password fields

A new option "Show placeholder characters" is introduced. If this option is deselected, SAP GUI does not fill password fields with placeholder characters. Instead the placeholder characters (dots or asterisk) appear as you type. This reflects the behavior of several other applications, but has the disadvantage that it is more obvious how many characters have been typed. The default setting remains unchanged, which means by default, SAP GUI keeps displaying the placeholder characters for empty password fields.

Removed features in SAP GUI for Windows 7.70

This time we haven't removed any visual theme, but have just cleaned-up the theme selection and removed a rarely used legacy component that has a functional alternative:

• The Belize theme offered a so-called “Fallback” theme in SAP GUI for Windows 7.50 and 7.60. This “Fallback” was used for SAP systems which do not support the Fiori feature set. As of SAP GUI for Windows 7.70 no “Fallback” theme is offered anymore. The theme set in the SAP GUI options dialog (or via other means like the SAP Business Client) is used for all systems a user connects to.

• The Assignment Control used in transaction UCWB is no longer available. A technical alternative is available as mentioned in SAP Note 2704440.

Outlook

We hope that release 7.70 will live up to your and our expectations - especially since it adds very important and long-expected new features. Our experiences from the Beta Program and our SAP internal roll-out are very encouraging, but of course some of the major new features listed above will certainly need our attention during the next couple of patches. We will completely focus on closing remaining gaps and fixing issues you might find for the next months.

Kind regards,
Frank Krause
Product Owner SAP GUI for Windows
on behalf of the SAP GUI for Windows Team

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Seokwon,

this is certainly a SAP GUI bug. I asked a colleague to investigate the issue, but it would regardless of this be good if you could raise an incident on component BC-FES-CTL.

Thank you,
Frank

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Tomas,

first of all: Thank you for your feedback. I appreciate that.

I would like to comment on some of your comments:

"But I have to say I was disappointed once again. Theme itself is not bad, still I would expect it to be more compact (a lot of free unused space)."

There are multiple aspects here:

Vertical space:  This does not have much to do with the theme. The screen layout is not made by SAP GUI, but by the application server (the application code and SAP Kernel). The fact that the applications do not use the full available space is because they have not been designed for this.
If you are running an SAP S/4HANA system, you can activate the so-called SAP Fiori Features. One of these features is the "automatic wide rendering" of subscreens - se also https://help.sap.com/viewer/bb49e152c3514105b4170e6802735425/1709%20000/en-US/42b1780202304721897bbf....
With this feature turned on, the applications use as much of the vertical space available as possible, because SAP Kernel automatically widens subscreens as far as possible.

Spacing as a whole: It is a conscious design decision to use the font size and line height that is used in Belize and Quartz (they are the same by the way in both themes). Yes, compared to older themes, this wastes space, but it leads to a visual effect that is desired. You will notice that if you turn off the "SAP Fiori Features", the line height is reduced in Quartz and Belize themes and is much closer to for example SAP Signature Theme. Here, we tried to stay compatible to the old times while transporting the visual effect of how the themes are designed. This is not easy, but I personally think this works pretty well.

"But main problem are still icons. IMHO they're strangely designed. It looks kind of blurry, strange, not tightened well."

I know how these have been designed and implemented and there is nothing "strange" about this. As opposed to former themes these icons are coming from an icon font and not bitmaps. If you use for example Corbu theme and display this with a big resolution, you will see that the Corbu icons look ugly, because they do not scale while the Belize and Quartz icons stll look the same as on lower resolutions. If you have issues with concrete icons (there is always something to improve about them), please feel free to report this to us. Whenever we see something unusual or get feedback on the icons we are incorporating this in the next version (if possible), but we need concrete feedback.

"Multi-Monitor-Scaling support - It will really help many users these days. But as it is not supported in Corbu, not everybody. I guess it would be nice to mention supported themes. It would be: Belize and Quartz."

Quote from this blog: "The feature can be activated for Belize and Quartz themes if a sufficiently new Windows version is used via this setting".
Quote from the documentation: "This option is available as of the Belize theme."

"A lot of user settings are mentioned in notes, and accessible only in registry settings. This is really not the best and easiest way to go for standard users."

All settings that we consider relevant for individual users and that we believe are frequently used are shown in the SAP GUI options dialog.

Let's take the new features. The users can:
- Select the theme including the font and whether the menu can be displayed
- Select the browser control
- Activate multi monitor scaling
- Activate the different display of the placeholder characters in password fields
- Select whether the SAP GUI theme shall be used in ABAP Editor (via the options dialog of ABAP editor)

They cannot:
- Set the browser control fallback file (because this is for the admin who typically rolls out the settings via the installation package)
- Activate the changed focus handling in ALV
- Activate the hierarchical colors in tree control

But believe me: You do not want all available SAP GUI options to be displayed in the options dialog. It makes sense that we filter out those options which are used rarely, because otherwise the dialog would probably show twice as many options.

However: If users want one or both options mentioned above in options dialog, we can add them in a future version.

>Maybe think about having some of them as Group Policy, to allow administrators to change them?

Maybe we can look into this. Thank you for the proposal.

>Code completion preview is a bit smaller after upgrade.

Yes, that is absolutely possible.
In 7.70 the team responsible for the ABAP editor has invested a lot into getting this control properly scalable. There were many issues with this and a lot had to be changed. I personally remember that there were also issues with the size of the code completion.

I will forward your feedback to the responsible team. If you want to make sure this is resolved, you can also open an incident (on BC-FES-CTL).

"Source code w/o colors, strange refresh with duplicating code while scrolling."

I haven't seen this before and I could also not reproduce this. If you find a way to reproduce this, please tell us.

Thank you and best regards,
Frank

 

[badari_nathj]

Hi Tomas Chrastina,

Thanks for bringing ABAP Editor related observations. I would like to explain why "Code completion preview is a bit smaller in SAP GUI 7.70 while using smaller font size 9. In SAP GUI 7.70, ABAP Editor UI elements will be scaled based on the custom font chosen. Font can be adjusted using ABAP Editor settings dialog. In SAP GUI 7.60, UI elements are not scaled properly as per the font size and hence you can see that code hint window size will not be changed as per the font size. But in SAP GUI 7.70, code hint window will be scaled as per the font size. In SAP GUI 7.70, scaling related improvements are done and hence you can see the difference. You can increase font size so that code hint window size will also be increased proportionally. If you need any further clarification you can create an incident to bc-fes-ctl component so that we can check and get back to you accordingly.

Thanks and Regards,

Badari Nath

[Gurpreet_Jaspal]

Some of the popup in dark theme uses "black" fonts which is hard to read. Anyone found any fix for this?

Regards
Gurpreet

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Gurpreet,

this has already been discussed above. Some ABAP programs only take the background color, but not the font color from SAP GUI when creating HTML documents to be displayed in HTML Controls (like in your case shown above).
See SAP Note 2930005 for an explanation and related notes for fixes in ABAP components.

What you are seeing in your screenshot is likely a POPUP_TO_*.
The solution for those function modules is mentioned in SAP Note 2965688.

Best regards,
Frank

[Former Member]

Quick quiz: Which of the following three SICF nodes is activated? Hint: It's only one. Maybe you could increase the contrast here?

 

 

The answer is apc btw. abap and adt are not active. It's hard to see if you have just three nodes, it's impossible to distinguish them when it's 20.

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Marc,

the problem here is that the items need to have a minimum contrast of 3:1 to the background.
And a color which is darker (and more easily to distinguish from the regular text color) does not meet this criteria anymore. The real cause is that the text color in Quartz is not white or black (like in Signature for example), but some gray which does not allow a good contrast between different colors anymore.

I agree with you that this is not really good and will discuss this with our design team.

Best regards,
Frank

[former_member298832]

Hello @Frank Krauze,

When can we expect the first patch to arrive? The new 770 is quite buggy. I experience crashes - this is the worst but also the following:

• Performance browser - documentation for fields etc is often not displayed correctly - no content is shown or part of it. Definitely some rendering problem. It looks liek somethoing was drawn, but only oart of it and the rest is not refreshed in Windows. Need a GUI restart to make it work again (until it appears again)


• debugger window with code - code is also sometimes rendered only partially. Sometimes it's stuck and nothing is redrawn/refreshed in the window so I cant see what I'm debugging

These are the top 3 bugs you guys should address at high priority.

 

Now a few more comments:

• the new multi monitor support is very limited. usually only some elements in SAP GUI window are displayed correctly and they are smaller and sharp, but the rest is not an d is still blurry. The user experience is bad in this case. It looks messy. To me this is a very experimental feature thst lacks consistency at the current stage. Hope you guys fix it properly in the next patches


• the pakcage and object selector dropdown box rendered using IE control (now Edge apparently) sometimes disappears and one is not able to pick anything.

And one general opinion - since SAP GUI 750 when these monochromatic icons were introduced - I think this was a mistake. Not only colors help to find the right button, but the new icons are not enough precise anymore. You probably render it with fonts or other vector elements, but it just lacks precision. If you compareit to Google Material Icons - you'll see a huge difference. These are much more precise and elegant. They are renderd much better even on big screen lile PC monitors. You probably won't change it in 770 but please consider working on this element. In my opinion SAP GUI is worst and worst with every subsequent release. The last one I liked was 740. Quite elegant and robust. I know I can still pick its look and feel in options, but it's a shame that SAP joined this sad trends to go monochromatic. Nowadays when I work on a PC I feel like it was Windows 3.11 - ugly and monorchromatic. SAP GUI adds to this feeling.

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Grzegorz,

as usual, dates for patches are listed in SAP Note 1053737. Patchlevel 1 is expected for end of March.

Regarding the issues you mentioned above: Please report an incident for each of this. The issues won't be solved by mentioning them here and you can probably imagine that if everybody was facing this in general, we would have lots of incidents on this - but fact is: We don't.

Multi monitor scaling: Complete SAP GUI except for external content and stuff displayed on popups s rendered by SAP GUI itself.

the pakcage and object selector dropdown box rendered using IE control
(now Edge apparently) sometimes disappears and one is not able to pick anything.

The HTML Control is only using Edge if you configured it like that. But this issue is indeed something that another customer already mentioned and we are trying to reproduce it, but so far failed.

Regarding your opinion on the icons: I have forwarded this to our Global Design team. My personal view regarding the colors is quite similar to yours, but on the other hand we also got feedback saying that too many colors overwhelm the users.

Best regards,
Frank

 

[former_member298832]

Thank you for the very prompt reply, Frank. I'll report these issues as soon as they reoccur to capture some screenshots. Most of them happen every day to me. I never experienced any of them in 760 or 750.

Does SAP GUI have any logs that can be forwarded for analysis? Logs are IT standard nowadays and having in mind the fact that software is more and more complicated and has more and more layers an componets - logs are quite often the most helpful thing when analysing issues. Especially crashes. When e.g. SAP GUI crashes - can I find some logs to forward to SAP somewhere?

 

And regarding icons - yes, please send this feedback. The lack of colors could be somehow compensated if icons were drawn better and their shape was better as well. Google did a really great job and their icons scale flawlessly on PC monitors and mobile devices as well. SAP GUI monochromatic icons are not that nice and taking the fact they are all same color now - it really is harder to me to find the right button on screen. It takes more time. If you consider how many times a person searches for a button every day - it adds up to a significant amout of time during the week or month. This is just counterproductive and brakes overall UX.

 

Thanks and kind regards

Grzegorz

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Grzegorz,

>When e.g. SAP GUI crashes - can I find some logs to forward to SAP somewhere?

Of course we do have logs. In case of exceptions, we are writing an exception trace (unless some other module embedded in SAP GUI crashes or something really bad happens). You find those trace in the SAP GUI trace folder (see also options dialog).

In addition to this we offer many other logs, but it does not make sense turning tham on pro-actively. We need to have the right trace at the right time. In a support situation, the support colleagues will ask you for the traces we need.

Best regards.
Frank

 

 

[fernando_perezcampos]

Hello.

Every time I update SAP GUI I am hoping to find a new theme that I like, but I have to say that they go from bad to worse. It is less and less visual. I have tried the Quarz theme and it seems that I am running Windows 3.1. The lack of border on the tabs and other elements, the lack of colors in the icons among other things, make it terrible to use. I use a 32" screen and every time I have to record or cancel, I have to move the mouse cursor to the other side of the screen which is very annoying. For now I will continue to use the SAP Signature theme until it is no longer available.

Greetings, Fernando.

[former_member605047]

Hi!

Good job with 7.70! I have some feedback that don't feel like a "ticket". And I see that you Frank are active here and reading comments..

• Design not condense enough
  
  
  
  • All other applications on my PC are by default more condensed. Office, websites, system applications as file explorer etc. More compact design and smaller fonts. There is a lot of spacing in SAPGUI and the font is also quite big as default. Even if we change the font size the elements have a lot of spacing. For me, it feels a bit off and it might be the difference compared to other applications.
  
  
  
  


• Blurry icons
  
  
  
  • On a high res screen - there is something about the icons that feels blurry/off. I don't know is this is out of your hand but some of theme simply looks pixelated and it disturbs my eyes. Maybe I'm getting old...
  
  
  
  


• Colors in Quartz Dark
  
  
  
  • Maybe only a few people use this but when changing colors in Quartz Light - only the top bar changes color (as expected). However, with Quartz Dark - every element changes color and it's really not a good look. Would be good to have the same behaviour for consistency!
  
  
  
  

 

[SebastianK]

Hi. I have a question to the lightweight edge function:

"For example, when SAP GUI detaches a URL from an HTML Control inside SAP GUI, an external browser window opens. In case of Internet Explorer, this window offers a full navigation bar, but Edge does not offer a navigation bar."

Is there any way to activate the full navigation bar again? We need to be able to access and set URL bookmarks, which would be impossible with the new limited browsing window. If not, maybe this can become a feature to be activated via coding?

[badari_nathj]

Hi Sebastian Kotsch,

Thanks for reporting this issue. We have discussed this issue with Microsoft colleagues many times. They told that new window while using Edge can't be compared with new window of IE browser.  Currently we don't have any API to activate Navigation bar. We reported this issue to Microsoft and they have open backlog item on this. Till we get response from Microsoft(either we get some API  or mechanism to enhance the look of feel of new Edge window), we will not be able to change this behavior.

Regards,

Badari Nath

[hardyp180]

Here is another "feature" of the GUI 7.70 when Quartz is enabled. I am trying to auto-create a FORM routine.

Jolly Bad FORM

There is only one radio button that can be selected i.e. you have to create a new INCLUDE.This probably was not tested because no-one uses FORM routines any more (he he he)

Oh Dear!

Cheersy Cheers

Paul

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Paul,

Please report an incident for this.

Thank you,
Frank

[hardyp180]

Also when running the Quartz theme, often the performance is worse because it has to simulate what a UI5 application would do.

As just one example - in an ABAP program double click on a string so you can create a text element for it. Normally you would get the little box asking "do you want to create the text element" straight away, but with Quartz you first have to look at the three balls bouncing up and down for a few seconds (the modern equivalent of the hourglass that used to appear in most applications whilst they were "thinking")

I know this was not intended for ABAP developers, but I think it is important for developers to get the same experience as the end users they write applications for so they can "feel their pain".

Cheersy Cheers

Paul

PS Has the hot fix come out yet? It's been over a month.

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Paul,

because it has to simulate what a UI5 application would do.

We do not simulate UI5 applications. Quartz is a theme which is exactly like the other SAP GUI themes with a few changed parameters (colors, metric, button positions) and some addtional features that need to be consumed by applications. The biggest internal change is a new rendering engine based on Direct2D - performance issues could be related to that even though we optimized this quite a lot. However, if we get a reproducible sample, we will try whatever we can to further improve this.

PS Has the hot fix come out yet? It's been over a month.

Which hotfix? We can't produce hotfixes for the first patch in a release, because the first patch is not a patch, but a DVD. And until today we haven't received a request for a hotfix in release 7.70.
If you are referring to patchlevel 1: This is planned for end of March (see SAP Note 1053737).

Best regards,
Frank

 

[hardyp180]

On the first matter I have probably got the wrong end of the stick, as we say in the UK. Somehow I had it in my head that the Quartz theme was trying to follow the Fiori 3 design principles. As we know Fiori is a design pattern which is technology agnostic so it deals with matters such as where the "exit" button should be and whether messages should be at the bottom or top of the screen and so on.

I had the idea that the approach was to apply the same sort of UI "patterns" to UI5 / Web Dynpro / SAP GUI, and indeed all the assorted products SAP has acquired over the years so that in every UI no matter what technology is behind it the SAP logo is in the same place, as are the help and exit buttons, search buttons and so forth. As in the Quartz theme almost everything is in a different position than it would be in (say) the SAP signature theme I had presumed the reason everything had been moved was to unify with the Fiori design pattern rather than just moving things around for the sake of it.

As to the second matter this is more of a philosophical debate. The question is - when releasing a major new release of anything, does one make a hard and fast rule that no matter how many bugs are in that release, we wait three months exactly before releasing the next version (patch level one in this case). That is what happened before when SAP released that version of the SAP GUI that was so full of bugs that it made everyone lose their temper and become nasty and abusive. As I said I don't think the problem then was so much that there were hundreds of bugs but rather that SAP appeared to refuse to fix them in a timely manner i.e. at once, probably for the reason given above.

That was cold comfort back then as that GUI version was almost impossible to uninstall and go back to the prior one, so everyone had to endure agony for three months. It seems strange to us "customers" because we are used to deploying something to production and then when serious bugs are reported doing some sort of emergency fix during the first week, sometimes the first day.

Now this time things are rather different - it is easy to revert to a previous version, and because so many people got burned last time they all know how to do this. More importantly there are a lot less bugs in this release and no fatal ones. I feel no need to revert. There are lots of little annoying things as reported by assorted people in the comments in this blog, but nothing that makes the world end.

Next we come to semantics - I work for a German company so I know how difficult the language barrier can be. Not just the words, but the country specific mindset underneath. That can be a huge barrier e.g. when a UK person says "that's not bad" they mean whatever they are talking about is fantastic and "with the greatest respect" is usually an insult.

So no-one may have asked for a hot-fix explicitly, apart from me in an earlier comment to this blog, and even then I did not actually ASK for it, I just implied it would be a really good public relations move, because that is the sort of thing virtually all of SAPs competitors do.

The question becomes - how many reported bugs would it take to move forward the planned date of the first patch level? Last time the answer was the first patch level was coming out 90 days after the initial release no matter how many bugs there were because that was the original plan. Has that sort of attitude changed in the interim?

Cheersy Cheers

Paul

[sven_schneider2]

Hello Frank,

where I can find this option in SE80 :

"You can use the workarounds mentioned below or you can switch to the "GUI control-based input fields" in the configuration of SE80." (note 2901278 suggests this as well)

 

Best regards

Sven

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hi Sven,

if you have a sufficiently new system (I found this as of SAP_BASIS 7.51), you go to the main menu, select "Utilities" -> "Settings" and switch to tab "Workbench (General).

Best regards,
Frank

[thomasb3]

Exactly the same problem. but not only when debugging. It comes up from time to time, jumps to the SAP GUI windows a few times and then stops after a few jumps.

Happens regularly, also colleagues reported the same issue.

Is there a fix in the meantime ?

Thomas

[sven_schneider2]

Hello Frank,

o.k, but what is the solution for all the customers with SAP_BASIS 7.50 and lower.
Most of them don't have SAP S/4HANA based systems.

And I think, the main solution can not be the fallback configuration, as described in note 2957665.

Best Regards,
Sven

 

 

[michael_fallenbchel]

Hi Frank,

after several calls with one collegue of you + your support team in India, several screen recordings, SAP GUI traces + finding the root cause (maybe?), I just recognized that there are 2 notes created regarding this issue (3032805 / 3032509).

Good to hear that we are one step further...

 

Thanks for your time, I know I had a lot of "problems" during Beta phase 😉

Hope Microsoft will solve this ASAP, just installed latest updates for Win 10 and tried to connect to my network share - still have the "session party" on my screen 😉

 

Regards

Michael

[michael_fallenbchel]

There is already a package for SAPscript Legacy Text Editor 7.70 (called SCR LEGACY TEXT EDITOR GUI7.70), to be found under Maintenance Software Components

 

Regards

Michael

[michael_fallenbchel]

I sometimes have as well the problem that code is duplicated.

To fix this, I mark the coding lines which will "refresh" the duplicated lines to the correct code.

 

If I have this issue again, I will do a screen recording to show this a bit more in detail

 

Regards

Michael

[wagener-mark]

Any idea/plans when PL 1 or a hotfix will be released?

[stefan_buechold_wittenste]

Hi Frank,

can you please tell me which symbol font is being used? I got that problem, that there are no icons displayed in SAP GUI with theme blue crystal, belize and quartz. I already installed the sap-icons from fiori guidelines page for all users, https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design-web/downloads/#sap-icon-font. I rebooted my workstation several times and switched from different themes back to newer themes. Also a fresh installation of SAP GUI (and all other components) does not solve the issue.

Did I miss something? Please find some screenshots below.

Thank you so much for any help and advice!

 

Best regards

Stefan

SAP GUI Options

 

MM03 - display material

[FrankKrauseGUI]

As always: See SAP Note 1053737. The patch is on track for delivery on 31st of March.

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Stefan,

Belize and Quartz themes are using the SAPGUI-Belize-Icons.TTF, Blue Crystal is using SAPGUI-icons.ttf. You do not have to download anything - the fonts are installed together with SAP GUI.

Unfortunately, the font installation under Windows is causing problems again and again.

If the issue affects only a single client, you can delete those fonts from the Windows fonts folder and manually install them by double-clicking.

Best regards,
Frank

 

[stefan_buechold_wittenste]

Thanks a lot, Frank!

Manual installation of that font did solve that issue.

Best regards,

Stefan

[hardyp180]

Going back to whether the Quartz Theme is supposed to be like the Fiori 3 guidelines, as followed by Fiori applications, I was interested to note the following in an SCN blog:

From Touch Support Blog

If the technical name of the Quartz theme is SAP_FIORI_3 then would it be unreasonable to assume that in some sense it relates to the SAP Fiori 3 guidelines?

I cannot wait for next week when the PL1 comes out. As I said there are loads of bugs but nothing drastic this time, but it is still vaguely annoying and tends to distract me when i am making emergency fixes to something at our organization that was put into production yesterday which naturally I am fixing today, as anyone would.

Cheersy Cheers

Paul

[former_member504653]

I have the same problem. I'm using release770 patch 1, the windows are changing from one to the other.

[gio82]

Hi,

We are looking to pilot utilization of IE or Edge located in differnt sub-dynpro but starting from the same dynpro. Basically the user should be able to select between web application 1 (based on IE) and application 2 (based on Edge).

According to note 2957665 "SAP GUI HTML Control: Browser Control Fallback Configuration" it looks this is not possible.

Is there a way to pilot the browser setting (IE/Edge) from Abap code?

Thanks 

[jaroslav_mrazek]

Hello Badari,

the size of "Code completion" is really too small and little bit blurred, when the font size 9 is used in abap editor.
For font size 10 in abap editor is displayed size of "Code completion" readable, but the font size 10 is too big for the work. The proportion between the used font and font of code completion is not good defined.
My display resolution is 2560x1440, scalling 100%.

Best regards,
Jaroslav

[MZ1919]

Installed newest Patch (GUI PL1, BC PL2).

GUI still starts to jump from one to the next modus without user interaction!

And this on a regular basis, like a shuffle mode.

 

You have to close SAP GUI application completely to stop it from "jumping".

[RobA]

I agree it would be helpful if SAP released hot fixes as individual bugs were fixed, it's too painful waiting for an SP if you have real issues impacting your userbase.

This might not be practical due to internal SAP development and release processes, but Paul is right that it would make SAP catchup with their competition

My personal view is that by 770 PL02 we will have a stable enough version to roll out to a small productive use test group and by PL03 to wider business.

I also really wanted to like the Quartz Dark mode but found myself reverting to an older theme, I might try again when some of the bugs are gone.

[ChrisGela]

thanks also had issues in some tcodes like SM50:

the notes mentioned have resolved it.

and :2938245 - Dynamic Documents : the GUI foreground and background colours inconsistent

[badari_nathj]

Dear Colleagues,

We have tried to increase the Font size of Code Hint text. In SAP GUI 7.70, we have implemented scaling mechanism as per the Font and DPI settings. With this, code hint text size is scaled down as per the Font size chosen. That is why you can see the difference between SAP GUI 7.60 and 7.70. Technically text is scaled as per the Font size in SAP GUI 7.70 which is correct. But text is is not clearly visible and it is inconvenient for the users so we have increased the font size so that it is visible even if users set font size to smaller values.

We hope this is fine with you. Fix will be available in one of the next subsequent patches of SAP GUI 7.70.

Regards,

Badari Nath

[Daniele_Sgi]

This link

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/softwarecenter/template/products/_APP=00200682500000001943&_EVEN...

is broken.

The component is not yet available, and the old 7.60 doesn't work for 7.70; SAP how long does it take to provide ?!

[former_member722437]

Hi

I have the same probleme, any solution ?

 

Nazim.

[MZ1919]

Here are the SAP notes:

3032805

3032509

 

 

[manwell77t]

Hi experts,

installed SAP GUI 7.7 Patch Level 1. I'm experiencing a bug related to dropdown with this aspect:

it's systematic: always dump:

This is a big problem; especially for workflow transactions.

Seems depending on theme: using old "Classic Theme" doesn't happen. Using SAP Signature, Belize or others it happens.

[tivi_horvath2]

Hello,

OSS Note 3032509 still points to this conversation. Has this issue been addressed now?

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/3032509

I have mapped drives per corporate policy so the workaround does not work for me and had to go back to the 7.60 Gui as the 7.70 gui was absolutely unusable.

Thanks.

 

 

[Daniele_Sgi]

Hi Rob,

 

did you find "SAPscript Legacy Text Editor 7.70" ?

Contrary to what they say, I still don't find any releases, but only broken links and empty data.

 

Thanks

[johnm16]

Hi Folks,

I sympathise with everyone who is encountering bugs with v7.70 - a convincing reason to revert to earlier versions.

I'm trying it for the first time,  and my only problem so far is simple useability.

With 7.50,  I had the options to (simultaneously):

1. Have a different colour for every server.

2. Cascade new sessions neatly so as not to run out of desktop;  this is critical if you need a lot of sessions open. With 7.50 it was a breeze (I use a 21" 4:3 screen,  1600x1200).

3. Have plenty of session 'real estate',  so I don't have to scroll down all the time.

GUI 7.70 doesn't offer these options (7.60 didn't either,  but I kept hoping).  The only themes that allow server-specific colours don't cascade in a compact way, and/or waste massive amounts of space within each window.

To be sure, I'm a developer, and I like to work in a particular style (lots of sessions open across 2 or 3 servers - it saves me time).  If I just had to log into a Production server,  7.70 would be adequate,  although the space-wasting approach would mean I would need to use one of the older themes.

And I understand that the way new sessions cascade probably (?) has something to do with the Windows 10 environment.

But it really doesn't seem too much to ask for at least what we had in 7.50.

Cheers,

John Moulding

 

 

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello John,

thank you for your feedback.

From my perspective it is not true that SAP GUI for Windows 7.60 or 7.70 waste more screen real-estate. You certainly meant to say that new themes like Belize or Quartz waste more space. If this is your statement, I agree with it - but this is by intention (designed to be wider and higher and use a larger font). However, the older themes (except the removed Enjoy) remain unchanged and they do no waste any more space in 7.60 / 7.70 as compared to 7.50.

And I do not see an issue with the cascading of SAP GUI WIndows in release 7.70 either. They cascade as desired leaving the caption visible with a small vertical offset. You might want to add a screenshot to explain the issue?

And finally: You can assign colors to every system as well. With the newer themes you have 5 different colors and if this is not enough for you, you can use SAP Signature Theme which allows to define 360 different hue shifts.

Except for Enjoy we did not remove anything in 7.60 or 7.70.

Best regards,
Frank

 

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Manuel,

yes, that is a very severe bug and I apologize for this.

It will be fixed by this SAP Note:

SAP GUI Toolbar Control: ABAP Dump is coming while clicking on a menu button which doesn't have context menu, note 3042756

This is part of patchlevel 2 and we have also published a hotfix for PL1 for this.

Best regards,
Frank

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Giò,

no, this is not possible and exactly what we do not want. If we allowed the ABAP applications to detect which control will be used, this would result in applications which actively decide not to support one of the available controls. And if many applications are doing this, you will get some which work in IE and some in Edge.

The HTML applications embedded in the HTML Control must react on which browser they are located in (for example via user agent string).

We are striving to make the HTML Control based on Edge as compatible as possible to the Internet Explorer version and basically my opinion is that we have managed to come quite close already. There are some exceptions, but together with Microsoft we are trying whatever is possible.

Best regards,
Frank