Based on Carolyn Fuller's discovery work in January 2012 for OPA on Netweaver 7.02

Can't Do List:

  1. Automatically calculating totals in an input table similar to Create JV, RFP, Create Requisition, etc
    • Bill found the timedTrigger UI element which looked very promising. The only problem is that when this UI element is triggered, SAP selects the current input field, causing all the data to disappear when the user types their next character. We looked for a way to move the focus to the end of the field. Again we found many promising leads but they all failed. In order to move the focus to the end of the field, the ABAP program must know the current focus and there is no way for the program to know current focus unless the event that is triggered is associated with the inputField UI element of interest. TimedTrigger is the UI element that trigged the event so by definition it is not the inputField UI element of interest. 
    • Again, the important takeaway for a WDA developer is that we don't know what row or cell a person is in unless we are in the "Action" code and that "Action" is associated with the cell of interest. Then we can determine the current row via the input parameter WDEVENT. 
  2. ALV is pretty easy to implement but it causes a lot of Java Script errors which indicates it might not be as stable as desirable. We decided not to implement ALV because of the Java Script errors it generated. You can see these errors in the SAP supplied demo applications. They all begin with SALV_WD_TEST* and are all activated in SF2.
  3. Placing two UI elements into a single cell of a table is, on the whole, not possible. In 7.02, SAP gave us a new cell variant, TableMulitpleCellEditor. This cell variant allows multiple UI elements to be in the same cell but it is a very limited list of UI elements, (i.e., Button, LinkToAction, FileDownload, LinkToURL, ToggleButton)
  4. We wanted a dropdown with the last item in the list being "other" and selecting "other" both replaced the select with an inputField in that cell and brought focus to that text input
    • We could not control the focus. 
    • I thought I discovered something promising when I discovered the class, CL_WD_FOCUS_INFO and the methods IF_WD_VIEW=>REQUEST_FOCUS_ON_VIEW_ELEMENT and IF_WD_VIEW_CONTROLLER=>REQUEST_FOCUS. These allowed me to place focus but…
      • I could only place focus on a TextEdit UI element
      • It only works in I.E. It does not work for Safari or Firefox
    • On top of that, SAP does not provide any visual cues that "input" UI elements within a table are open for input. so the inputField that replaced the dropdown did not appear to be open for input. And since the cursor was not in that field, it could be a confusing experience for users. 

Can Do List:

  1. We can add a non-modifiable footer to a WDA table with modifiable rows. Using cell variants, it is easy to change the kind of UI elements used in a column. The first column in the first row can be open for input and the same column in the next row can be a drop down and the same column in the next row can be a read only field. Cell variants allow the programmer to toggle between the UI Elements pretty easily.
  2. Spanning columns is possible but I didn't do it. Dudley had to do it for eLearning.
  3. As I mentioned earlier but want to highlight here, using standard cell variants, we can easily toggle between a dropdown and an inputField in the same cell, based on the user's selection from the dropdown. But since we can't control the focus and there are no visual cues as to the inputField being open for input the results are confusing for the end user.