Creating and Saving Variants

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Creating and Saving Variants

A variant is a saved set of selection criteria. You can use these criteria for lists and reports . You can create variants for your own use and share them with others.

TIP

Two Meanings  

The word variant has one other meaning in SAP R/3. Within Production Planning, it's used to describe products that are built with different options. For example, a Ford with an automatic transmission is a variant of a Ford with a manual transmission. That kind of variant is a separate topic and won't be covered here. If you need to know more about PP variants, choose Help, Help Library, Production Planning, Variants.

Suppose that your area of responsibility includes Purchasing groups 11, 14, 19, and 53 through 72. You might want to see requisitions for these areas only. Follow these steps:

1. From the Purchasing screen, choose Requisitions, List Display, General. The List Display of Purchase Requisitions screen appears.

2. Click the extended selection criteria arrow (beside the Purchasing Group). The Multiple Selection for Purchasing Group dialog box appears (see Figure 13.1).

   Figure 13.1. These multiple selections can get long and complex; notice the page-down symbols in both areas of the screen.

   

3. Fill in the boxes with the values shown in Figure 13.1 to see requisitions for your purchasing groups only. (You can use the selection criteria in a similar way for any other field.)

4. Click the Copy button to return to the List Display of Purchase Requisitions screen.

5. Choose Goto, Variants, Save As Variant (see Figure 13.2). The ABAP/4: Save as Variant screen appears. SAP R/3 prompts you for the name and description you would like to use to save your selection criteria.

   Figure 13.2. Saving a variant.

   

6. Enter the required information (see Figure 13.3) and press Enter. SAP R/3 displays a message that the variant you created is saved.

7. Exit the List Display of Purchase Requisitions screen by clicking the — (Cancel) tool button. From the Purchasing screen, reopen the list by choosing Requisition , List Display, General.

8. Click the Get Variant button. SAP R/3 displays a list of all variants for List Display of Purchase Requisitions to which you have access. Figure 13.4 shows only one variant on the list, the one just saved; in your case, however, there could already be more variants.

   Figure 13.3. Choose a name and description for the variant.

   

   Figure 13.4. Choose a variant from the list (in this case, there's only one).

   

9. Double-click the variant you want to reload. You're returned to the List Display of Purchase Requisitions screen. As you can see in Figure 13.5, the screen now contains all the criteria you keyed in and saved earlier. The colored arrow beside the second purchasing group tells you that extended selection criteria are in effect for that field.

Figure 13.5. An extended selection is in effect.

You create and save variants the same way, regardless of what fields and which selection criteria you use.

The variant you just created is available to any other users on your system. They can see, use, or even change the variant you created:

• If you want to protect your variant from being changed by other users, click the Protect variant check box (refer to Figure 13.3).

• Click the Do not display variant check box if you don't want your variant to appear on the variant list (again, refer to Figure 13.3).

In this lesson, you learned how to use variants to save time when you have large or complex selection criteria for lists and reports. You also learned how you can save and share these selection criteria with other users. In the next lesson, you see how to include long text descriptions with a record and to edit that text.

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