Enhancing Data Elements Using CMOD

What kind of Enhancements are possible for Data Elements?

Developers at SAP define standard data elements to be used in the standard application logic and screens. They define field labels and documentation for these data elements.

Only the following enhancements are possible for standard Data Elements at the customer site:

• Field Labels i.e. Short/ Medium/ Long/ Heading field labels & Short Description.
• Data Element Documentation i.e. the F1 Help for the data element.

Enhancing Field Labels

Suppose, you want to change the field labels being used for a specific field globally in all SAP application screens. This can be achieved by enhancing the Field labels of the underlying data element. Once the enhancement is complete, all the application screens using this data element will display the enhanced field label.

Enhancement of field labels of Data Element is done using transaction CMOD.

• Steps of Enhancement

1. Go to transaction CMOD.
2. Navigate in the menubar to Goto -> Text enhancements -> Keywords -> Change.
3. Enter the Data Element.
4. Maintain the enhanced field labels.

• Prerequisite

The above mentioned enhancement of field labels of standard data elements would affect only those fields in standard SAP screens for which the ‘Modify’ attribute is not set as ‘F’.

You can check the ‘Modify’ attribute for screen fields by following steps depicted below:

• At Upgrade

During SAP upgrade process, if the new SAP release redelivers the data elements with some corrections, customer’s enhancements to those data elements in the previous release is no more active. These enhancements can be restored by customer after upgrade is over by starting the Customer Restoration program through Transaction CMOD -> Goto -> Text enhancements -> Keywords -> Restore cust. version.

• Reverting Enhancement

The way customer enhancements are restored after upgrades, similarly, at any point of time, to undo all field label enhancements of data elements and restore SAP delivered field labels, the SAP restoration program can be started from Transaction CMOD -> Goto -> Text enhancements -> Keywords -> Restore SAP version.

Enhancing Data Element Documentation

SAP provides documentation for each of the delivered data elements, which gets displayed as F1 help for screen fields based on the specific data element. This documentation can be enhanced using transaction CMOD. The customer enhanced version of documentation can refer to SAP delivered documentation of data element.

The steps to be followed for enhancing documentation of data element is depicted in the graphic below:

In this post, we covered the various possibilities of enhancing data elements. In order to make the content of this post more complete, I invite your feedback/ questions/ corrections in form of comments or mails.