Browser-based master data maintenance since SAP BW 7.40

With SAP BW 7.40, the transaction RSDMD for SAP BI InfoObject master data maintenance uses the ABAP WebDynpro technology. Instead of opening the maintenance view within the SAP GUI, the maintenance has to be done in the web browser window by default. This change has been implemented by SAP for two reasons:

• Many customers expressedly asked for a web based maintenance without the need to have the SAP GUI installed and
• A change in the maintenance transaction due to the new functionality of InfoObjects using ‘extralong texts’ was required.

From a functional aspect, the new web-based maintenance is a bit different than the GUI based view. It is only possible to call the views for the different master data tables (attributes, time-dependent attributes and texts) separately and no common view exists. Filtering and sorting with the ABAP WebDynpro views is also more complicated than with the traditional GUI technique. While XL texts are displayed correctly in the web browser, only the first 128 characters of the XL texts are displayed in the SAP GUI.

According to SAP Note 1997402, the old GUI-based maintenance is not officially available any more. Customers, that don´t use XL texts and despite of the SAP note mentioned before want to use the old SAP GUI-based master data maintenance have the following option:

• change the variable ‘l_use_old_ui’ in function module RSDMD_MDMT in debugging mode to ‘X’ (for an exceptional one-time access) or
• modify the standard function module RSDMD_MDMT, e.g using the solution from Gareth Findley as described in https://archive.sap.com/discussions/thread/3581941). However, modifications in general should be avoided and if modifications exist, they need to be checked during release upgrades in SPDD/SPAU.

After setting the value of variable ‘l_use_old_gui’ to ‘X’, the old SAP GUI master data maintenance is possible again:

Have fun!