GUI scripting is an SAPGui automation service that useful for many purposes. Especially administrator of SAP Systems perform heavy wizardry with using Spreadsheets and GUI scripting. If you don’t know what I’m talking about just visit the scripting homepage that is available at SAP GUI Family by clicking on the SAP GUI Scripting link in the lower right section. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about a small video can show you the basics of scripting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3i9TLhRXFc .
The Present…
Let me give some examples. I know an admin who maintains software logistics of complex systems landscapes with dozens of systems with an excel sheets. His Excel sheet controls transactions STMS, SE03, SE09 and SGEN. He downloads protocols, adds them to his sheets and can even start imports and much more. Using this sophisticated sheet he can install SAP systems and make them ready to run within shortest time. Another admin controls SM37 (job execution) and get the results (job log & spool) back to his Excel sheet. When I first saw those excel sheets and I couldn’t believe what I saw.
And the Future?
SAP told us that ABAP Dynpro therefore GUI scripting is obsolete. What are the consequences?
At first the good news: I think that all transactions above mentioned admins used will be the last ones who will ever be migrated. The same is probably true for transaction SPRO and most of the “infrastructure”. But the question still remains: will there be a solution for WDA dialogs? At the moment I don’t know anything comparable but I may be wrong. eCATT is much too heavyweight to perform this task and the same seems to be true for test tools like Selenium.
If we only have to evaluate data we could start get more familiar with BI on demand or perhaps Xcelsius. But nevertheless it should be possible to do GUI scripting in web environment. It should be possible to access the content of a WDA foorplan or the views (resp. context) of a single WDA component using REST web services. If we write an API that is at least as comfortable as the SAP Scripting API then this could solve our problems
