SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – Performance: What is Tab Bar?

[Jorge_Baltazar]

UPDATE – Relevant for S/4HANA 2022, 2021, 2020, 1909, 1809, 1709, 1610

Surely you have heard about Tab Bar in Fiori 2.0, and despite having heard of it you are still wondering how it works and what you need to set it up.

If you are facing this situation, you are in the right place so let’s start by defining what Tab Bar is:

Tab Bar is a new way of rendering Fiori Launchpad (FLP) Tiles, in earlier versions, the FLP loaded all tiles at the same time, this meant for the users to interact with all the assigned tiles they needed to “scroll” down the page to find the required tile. 

From a performance perspective, this meant an issue because all tiles needed to be loaded prior to the FLP being rendered, additionally if the user was assigned hundreds of tiles the rendering time of FLP increased as it is directly affected by the number of assigned tiles.

In Fiori 2.0 it is possible to modify how FLP displays the tiles by enabling “Tab Bar”, this will allow FLP to display all available tiles per Business Group which translates into lower rendering times.



Enabling this new rendering mode will affect how users interact with FLP as they will move from “scrolling” to “tab navigation”. You can find an example of how navigation changes in the following video:



UPDATE - Recommended UI5 library version is 1.44.21 due to issues described in SAP Note 2526182

Now that we have understood what this new feature does, the next step is to activate it. Overall, two steps are needed to configure this setting:

1. Create PFCG Role and Fiori Catalog ZUI5_TAB, which will enable/disable Tab Bar.


2. Fiori Catalog will be based on Target Mapping configurations, semantic object “Shell”, action “bootConfig”

This time we will skip the steps for creating a PFCG Role and Fiori Catalogs so we can focus on explaining the Target Mapping parametrization, which basically requires you to setup two parameters:

Parameter	Description
renderers/fiori2/componentData/config /applications/Shell-home/homePageGroupDisplay	Setting this parameter allows an administrator to forcibly enable/disable Tab Bar for all users who are assigned the PFCG role. It has two values: “scroll” to display FLP in scroll-mode; “tabs” to enable Tab Bar.

 

Here you can see the difference of using the value “scroll” vs “tabs”:

Parameter	Description
renderers/fiori2/componentData /config/applications/Shell-home /enableHomePageSettings	Setting this parameter will enable End Users to switch on/off Tab Bar functionality from the User Settings Menu at will. It is important to understand that when the user changes the Home Page setting the value is stores at User Personalization level so the Administrator can no longer forcibly enable Tab Bar.

 

Here you can see how the user settings menu is modified:



If you wish to enable both parameters, your target mapping would look similar to this:



Once this is done, assign the PFCG Role to your end-users and enjoy Tab Bar.

 

Becoming a SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA guru

You’ll find much more on our SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA wiki

Do you have any questions? Let us know in the comments section.

Thanks,

SAP S/4HANA RIG