SAP Local Tab Order Customizing
The SAP GUI for Windows allows to define for each screen a customizing of the tab order. You can find more information here about the local tab order feature. If you press Ctrl and right mouse button you can find at the end of the context menu these items:
With Visualize Local Tab Order you can see the sequence of fields if you press the tab key.
All sequences are stored in a SQLite database, which is defined in the SAP GUI Options:
So far so well. Also each user has the possiblity to define its own tab order for each screen, with the menu item Configure Local Tab Order. You can see it in the following example. Here I jump directly form field 2 to 14.
In the SQLite database you can find exact this as Start- and EndFieldname.
Also I defined an exit point at field 14, this means the pressing of the tab key jumps to back button. Here a different perspective via the Configure Local Tab Order dialog.
Effects on Automation Workflows
What effects could this have on automation workflows?
It is possible that your workflow doesn’t run correctly, when you build a workflow which works as an attended bot and your workflow uses the tab key to switch to the fields and the user which executes the workflow has defined a local tab order. That are a lot of conditions. Perhaps there is a small chance that they will occur. But when it does occur, you can spend a lot of time to analyze it to find the reasons of this behaviour.
How can we react to that?
- Don’t use the tab key to switch to the fields.
- Use only the IDs of the fields.
- It would also be possible to simply clear the database. But here we intervene in the sovereignty of the user settings. In my opinion not a good idea.
I admit that this behaviour is rather “exotic”. But it is good to know this.