Smart Forms have been introduced in SAP Basis Release 4.6C as the tool for creating and maintaining forms.  This tool allows developers to execute simple modifications to a form and the form logic by using simple graphical tools; in 90% of all cases, without any programming effort. Thus developers can get away from the robotic approach in sap script development, and produce good quality layouts at much reduced estimates.

Let us look at the steps involved in creating smartforms within the SAP system.

Start smartforms transaction, give the name of the smartform that you want to develop and click the Create button. This transaction is also called the smartform-builder.

1.      The next screen has 3 sections –

Column 1              Global settings, pages and windows, window elements

Column 2              Details of each object selected in column 1

Column 3              Form painter for the developer to “visualize” each form object

2.      Under the page node in the first column, click on Create => Page. Give the page name and description. Give the appropriate Next page in the General Attributes of the page. The Output Options tab is for defining the print attributes for the page.

3.      Under the existing page node in the first column, click on Create => Window. Give the window name and description. Give the appropriate Next page in the General Attributes of the page. The Output Options tab is for defining the position and size of the window. The main point is to define the window type as Main or secondary depending on the need. Every page can have only ONE MAIN WINDOW and the width of the main window should be same on all the pages – height can differ.

4.      Before creating the various elements in the windows, the programmer should define a smart style – this contains the various paragraphs and character sets that need to be used for the text elements, and is synonymous with the sap script style. Let us see how this is done.

a.       Invoke transaction SMARTSTYLES. Enter the style name, and choose Create to create it. Activate the style after creating it and ensuring it that it is error-free.

b.      The default paragraph, default tap stops, characters/inch and lines/inch, font family and font sizes should be defined in the header data of the smartstyle.

c.       A paragraph format consists of defining indents, spacing, font settings, text color, tabs, numbering and outline.

d.      The text flow can be defined for a paragraph, in the form of the below two attributes

                                                  i.            Page protection – Enabling this prevents the paragraph from being split across pages due to a page break. If there is not enough space left on the current page to accommodate the paragraph, the entire paragraph gets pushed on to the next page

                                                ii.            Next paragraph – Enabling this links the current paragraph to the subsequent paragraph, and prevents them from splitting across pages due to a page break.

e.       Character formats can be defined using the attributes Superscripting, Subscripting, Barcode, font attributes like family/size, bold/italic, underlined and color.