Using Search Helps
Search helps are a very useful tool to aid the user selecting data from the database, and many reports have this F4 search help functionality:
Enhancing Search Helps
But did you know that you can include your own search helps?
Example: you have added additional fields to the order Enhancement tab via user-exit IWO10018 and you want to search for order using these customer-specific fields.
Simply ask your ABAP team to include a new search help in the list.
These search helps can be very simple table selects, or very complicated searches which call an external ABAP program in the same way that IW32 order searches can call IW39 via the F4 option:
Search Help HotKeys
Did you also know that you can use hotkeys to search for data? This is a throw-back to the old R2 days and is still available.
Example: You want to search for equipment by the equipment short text using the "Equipment by short text" search help option.
Below we can see that this search help has the hotkey "T" designated:
And here is the search help screen for hotkey "T":
So how do we use the hotkey?
In the image below we enter "=T" which tells the system to use the "T" hotkey. Then each successive "." delimits the fields. So the image below shows that F1 has been passed to the first data field, and F2 to the 2nd field, and so on.
If you have entered data that selects valid data, then you d never see the search help popup, only the selected data as shown below:
Hope this was useful
PeteA