Hi,
I've recently been introduced to Persona and I am working my through it.I would like to discuss few limitations I came across.
First its a great GUI tool for simplifying a lot of the standard processes. I've been working as an sap technical consultant from the past few years and seeing the customization possibilities that can be achieved through persona rather than using enhancements etc is quite interesting. It's a quick fix for designing standard screens as per the clients requirement and hiding the unnecessary areas/fields.
I will explain the issues I faced as well as I can along with scenarios.
adding f4 help to custom fields.
scenario: creating a single screen for material creation and using custom fields and copying data to the mandatory fields from the initial screen and saving material.
even though this issue has been addressed before I am yet to find a definite solution. I have gone through Tamas' solution for the same and I thank him for his efforts, but the whole point of using persona is simplifying with ease. I can think of an alternate solution involving recording where I can copy all values currently entered and call another transaction for search help and get the selected value( with some amount of scripting) and call my initial transaction (material creation) and paste the old values in the respective fields and the list value (from the search help). A better solution would definitely be a built in functionality in script where we get the option for attaching search help for custom field.
hiding/displaying custom fields through script/properties:
Another issue I faced is during validation. A basic level of validation is to check if any value has been entered in a custom field, and the property "is required" is available for fields but does not do more than displaying a tick mark on the field. A good suggestion comes from Cheryl (How to handle mandatory fields in SAP Screen Personas) With a simple script we can check if a field is empty, and if it is empty then display any relevant message. I can manage to change values in the label but can't hide it. This would be a great addition if possible with the next version
Group box text properties:
Even though the customization makes the look and feel easy on the eyes, it still has limitations. As I mentioned above I have managed to create material from a single screen from multiple screens and tabs, I have maintained all the respective tab fields in a group box. After creating groups I realised the text of the group box doesnt have any properties apart from color. for ex. I cant change the size, or even make it bold.
I am aware that persona 3.0 will be launched soon and to be honest I am quite excited about it and have already enrolled for course for persona 3.0 on opensap. Hope it's way more improved than the current version. *fingers crossed*
