Intro S4HANA Using Global Bike Theme Designer en v3.3
Intro S4HANA Using Global Bike Theme Designer en v3.3
UI Theme Designer
This case study explains the UI Theme Designer, which is used to design
the Fiori Launchpad.
Version
3.3
Last Update
Juli 2019
What is a theme?
A theme defines the visual appearance of an application, including font size and type,
colors of UI controls and background images. It can be applied to an application to
suit the purpose, topic, or tastes of different users.
A custom theme is a new theme adapted from an SAP standard theme that includes
changes desired by a customer. A custom theme is typically created using the UI
theme designer to change theme parameter values, images, and other resources. The
UI theme designer generates the CSS for the custom theme which can then be
deployed to the target server along with any uploaded images or other resources. The
degree of support for the custom theme depends on the features used. Themes may
support one or more UI technologies.
Technical Information
The following graphic shows the SAP Fiori Launchpad architecture with the UI
Theme Designer.
SAP GUI
Fiori Launchpad
https://<SID>/sap/bc/ui5_ui5/ui2/ushell/shells/abap/FioriLaunchpad.html?sap-
client=<XXX>&sap-language=en
If you are working with the system A20 and client 200 your link would be
https://a20z.ucc.ovgu.de/sap/bc/ui5_ui5/ui2/ushell/shells/abap/FioriLaunchpad.html?sa
p-client=200&sap-language=en
UI Theme Designer
https://<SID>/sap/bc/theming/theme-designer?sap-client=<XXX>
If you are working with the system A20 and client 200 your link would be
https://a20z.ucc.ovgu.de/sap/bc/theming/theme-designer?sap-client=200
Table of contents
Introduction to the UI Theme Designer 2
Step 1: Logging into the UI Theme Designer 6
Step 2: Creating a custom theme 10
Step 3: Getting familiar with the UI Theme Designer 16
Step 4: Using Quick Theming 21
Step 5: Use Expert Theming 27
Step 6: Saving colors for later use 31
Step 7: Set up your Company Logo 34
Step 8: Adding background images I 37
Step 9: Adding background images II 39
Step 10: Change the Tile of the Launchpad 43
Step 11: Changing the default theme 46
The UI Theme Designer can be launched by running the transaction code in the SAP
GUI of your gateway system.
Log in to the SAP GUI with the user and password assigned by your
lecturer.
Note If you don’t want to get this message again select Remember My Decision
.
Log into the UI Theme Designer with the user and password
assigned to you by your lecturer.
Under you have the option to create a new theme. After opening a theme
you can also save and build your current theme.
Click on on the left of the navigation bar. You can see that it provides a link
to the help docs as well as access to the logs. Under About you find technical
information about your UI Theme Designer.
On the right side of the navigation bar you find the user to log of.
Since you haven’t created any theme yet there are no data entries in the table.
In the search field you can search for a theme by Title, ID, Vendor and by the theme its
based on. You will learn about base themes in a later step.
In the next step you will learn how to create a custom theme.
When creating your custom theme you can for example use the color scheme of your
company or your company logo. This way you can apply your corporal branding to
your Fiori Launchpad and the applications in it.
The following graphic shows the steps to build a theme using the UI Theme
Designer.
1. Use the Create New Theme wizard to create a new custom theme based on a SAP
theme. Or import an existing theme to edit it.
2. Add target content for the preview page.
3. Define palette parameters for reuse (this step is optional).
4. Adjust the theme that you created by:
a. Changing basic theme parameters.
b. Changing technology-specific parameters (optional).
c. Adding custom LESS or CSS (optional).
5. Save your theme.
6. Publish your theme to make it available for use.
In the first step you have to choose the base theme from the theme list.
The base theme is the foundation of the design you want to edit. To not have the
necessity of starting a theme from scratch you create a new custom theme based on
an already existing sap theme. Which you then adjust for customization.
Note The following link gives brief information about some standard themes:
https://help.sap.com/viewer/8ec2dae34eb44cbbb560be3f9f1592fe/7.52.1/en-
US/8c37f394f895469cac9b957744d781a1.html
You have to give your new theme a technical name (ID) which needs to be unique.
And a title, any name of your choice.
Select .
Here you can add a Vendor like for example the name of the organization who
creates the theme. Additional you can select the support for RTL (right-to-left
languages).
Note Be aware that if you select RTL support additional style sheets ate created by
the system and you could have performance issues.
Note When creating a new theme you don’t have to do step 2 and 3. Instead you can
just choose your base theme and then select . You can later edit the
misssing information.
The Create New Theme wizard closes and you will be directed to the Editor screen.
As you can see everything is still empty. In the next step you will add target pages.
The navigation bar has already been explained in the previous step. But as already
mentioned when having selected a theme for editing you have different options under
Theme .
Now Theme provides you with the option to create a new theme or save and build the
current theme. As well as close the current theme.
Click on . Here you can edit the theme properties defined in the Create
Theme wizard.
You can either simply Save it. Only the first time you save a new theme a pop up will
appear to ask about general data as seen below.
Or you can choose Save as… this way you can assign it ID and titel, as well as Vendor.
The third option is to Save & Build a theme.
A pop up will appear that you have succesfully saved the theme.
Before you start to make adjustments to the theme you should get familiar with the
UI Theme Designer itself.
As you can see the newly created theme has been added under Themes.
Note You can see a warning under status. This appears because your theme has
not yet been built.
As we now have a theme you can see new buttons. Here you can edit, rebuild, delete,
supplicate or rename your selected theme.
You want to change your custom theme. Make sure your new theme is selected then
click on .
The editing view is separated in three parts the Left Pane, the Preview Pane and the
Right Pane (currently hidden only the theming toolbar shown). The Preview Pane
will be explained in the next step.
Since you just created a new theme your left pane will still be empty.
As you can see in the picture there are three categories of traget pages:
Applications: Applications that have been loaded into the UI Theme Designer,
based on different UI technologies (e.g. Fiori Launchpad).
UI5 Control Previews: Pages related to a specific control.
And UI5 Application Previews: Application that run in the same domain as
the UI Theme Designer.
There are additional Categories for the sample applications.
The Add button allows additional target pages to be loaded for the preview.
You already see the Add Taget Pages in the Preview Pane. If this is not the case click
on in the Left Pane.
Note After having selected a theme you want to customize it. To be able to preview
any changes you need to add target content (pages and applications). This allows you
to see how the changes you make look in differen UI technologies.
If you have a specific application you want to change the design for you enter the
URL of the application under Link to Application.
As you can see there are already test suites for you to try out.
Note The previews available in the Add Target Pages section depend on the base
theme that you selected.
Click on Quick Theming. It might take a moment to load the Preview Pane.
The Right Pane consistes of Quick, Expert and CSS Theming as well as the Palette.
You will get to know all these in later steps.
In the UI Theme Designer open the editor with your custom theme
LEARN###Theme.
Click on Purchase Order in the Left Pane to open the application in the Preview Pane.
You can switch between the unchanged (Original) view and the edited view
(Preview) of your theme.
Since you haven’t done any changes you will not see any differences between the two
views.
You can also toggle between hiding and showing the left and rigt Pane. Click .
You now see the Preview over the whole browser width. Click again on to see
the Panes again.
Furthermore you can quickly preview built your theme. As well as reload the loaded
application in the preview.
As already mentioned there are four tools to edit the theme. One of these is
QuickTheming.
Quick Theming
You use Quick Theming for the majority of the changes. It allows some sweeping
high-level changes that are very robust across UI technologies and version therof.
Quick theming parameters apply to all supported UI technologies.
There are no dependencies between quick theming parameters unless you create
them.
Only a selected number of parameters is offered for editing. These are devided into
several categories:
Company Logo: The company logo can be themed.
Main: Main colors are used throughout the theme. The brand color is used for
foregrounds such as selected and active elements and should be a strong color.
The base color is used for backgrounds such as SAP Fiori Launchpad
background and should be a light color.
Highlights: Highlights can show up in many different contexts to draw attention
to specific elements.
Shell: Colors of SAP Fiori Launchpad.
Tile: Colors of SAP Fiori Launchpad Tiles.
Now you will use Quick Theming to edit your theme. Change the brand color.
Click on the color box next to Brand Color. Use the Color Picker to choose any
color then click on .
The Preview Pane will automatically show the changes. Is this not te case click on
reload .
Take a look at the Right Pane. Scroll down. You see that sever color boxes have also
changed it’s color value.
This is because changing the value of an quick parameter affects many controls at
once.
Hover over Barand Color. When hovering over the label (parmaeter name) you get
explanations.
You can further see the current, last and original value of the parameter. Since you
have already changed the value you can reset it back to the original or last saved
You will learn about Expert Theming, CSS Theming and the Palette in the next steps.
Task Use Expert Theming to make changes to your custom Time 15 Min.
theme.
Short Description In this step you will learn about Expert
Theming. How and what for you use it.
Expert Theming
If you want to change more than the Quick Theming can offer use Expert Theming.
Here you can make a finer grain of changes to your theme.
You get advanced options for adapting themes thanks to a greater number of
parameters for editing.
Both cross UI technology parameters and UI technlology specific parametrs are
supported.
There are dependencies between the parameters, i.e. the value of a parameter may be
derived from the value of other parameters. So when you change the value of a
parameter, this might change the value of other parameters as well.
Changing the value of an expert theming parameter only affects a specific control or
groups of controls.
Note The parameters available for editing are dependet on the base theme you have
selected and the application selected for the preview.
In Expert Theming you can search for a specific parameter by it’s name.
You can filter the parameters for colors, dimensions, typography and images. You can
further select to see all paramters that have been changed by clicking .
Click on to switch on the control picker mode. Now you can select an elementen
you want to change in the Preview Pane. Hover over the Page Header it will be
highlighted and click on it.
In the Right Pane you now see all parameters you can change for the Page Header
element.
Should the changes not appear immidiately in the Preview Pane click .
Note Changing the value of an expert theming parameter only affects a specific
control or group of controls.
In the next step you will learn how to define frequently used colors for easy reuse.
Task Save color parameters with the Palette and CSS Theming. Time 10 Min.
Short Description In this step you will learn how to save color
parameters for later reuse with the Palette and CSS Theming.
To ensure consistency in your branding you want to save color parameters. There are
two way to save colors for later reuse. Either by using the color picker in the Palette.
Or if you know the hexadecimal of the color you can use CSS Theming.
Palette
Use the Palette to define a set of colors for reuse. Define frequently used colors to
ensure consistency. For example you can add the color palette of your organization.
Add a new color by clicking into the color box. You can either define the color by
entering the hexadecimal or the red green blue values. You can as well just use the
color picker to select it visually.
Before you can add a parameter to the palette you have to give the color an ID. Click
into the first empty text box and give them the name reddish. Be aware that you can’t
change the name later.
You have now added your first color to the palette. You can reuse these colors by
referring to them by the ids (names).
CSS Theming
The CSS Theming allows for further customization of the theming that Quick or
Expert Theming do not provide.
You can use CSS or LESS.
Note LESS stands for Leaner CSS and is a style sheet language designed to making
CSS writing more efficient.
The main objectives are to enable intelligent controls and to avoid code repetitions.
LESS is an superset of CSS, which means that a CSS code is also valid LESS-code. It
complies to CSS.
You can add LESS and CSS rules in the text editor that is available in the CSS tab.
There are a lot of possibilities with the CSS Theming. You will only be defining a
color for later use.
In the UI Theme Designer select your theme My first theme ### for
editing.
Click on Purchase Order in the Left Pane. The application will open in the Preview
Pane. Make sure is selected.
You see the font family has been changed to Times New Roman.
Open Quick Theming. At the top of the Right Pane there is the section for the
company logo.
You can hover over Company Logo to get information about the current company
logo. As you can see there is currently no company logo selected.
Upload your company logo by clicking and selecting the image in the
filesystem. Choose any image you like.
Make sure that your newly uploaded image is selected and click on .
In the UI Theme Designer select your theme My first theme ### for
editing.
Under Application Background you can change the background for all applications.
You want to add your Launchpad as Target. Click on to add a new Target.
Note If you add an application the application needs to be running on the same
domain as the UI Theme Designer.
This means if your link for the UI Theme Designer is as follows:
https://<host>.<domain>:<port>/sap/theming/theme-designer?sap-client=100
Then the applications (e.g. Launchpad) needs to be on a link like this:
https://<host>.<domain>:<port>/sap/bc/ui5_ui5/ui2/ushell/shells/abap/Fiorilaunchpa
d.html
You now see that the background is back to being a pale blue. This is not an error.
In the last step we only changed the background image of the applications. The
background of the Fiori Launchpad is still the same as before.
Note The in the previous step commited changes (e.g. Logo) have already been
adapted. This is because the parameter set is independet of the application you
selected for the preview.
You might have noted that in the preview pane there appeared an additional icon in
the top bar.
Here you can change the preview screen between desktop, tablet and phone to see
your theme on different devices. Change the device to tablet.
You can see an additional icon appearing. With the devices tablet and phone selected
you have the additonal option to see the preview in landscape or portrait (selected)
mode.
Select landscape . You see the screen change the screen format . Change back to
desktop.
Depending background image selected it might make sense to also change the color
of the text. Adjust the Shell Text Color to give a better contrast between background
and Text.
You can further change the density of the background image under Shell
Background Opacity.
Be aware that your Launchpad might look different. This depends on the applications
in your Launchpad.
Task Change the Tile of the Launchpad with Quick Theming. Time 5 Min.
Short Description In this step you will learn how to change the
Tile of the Launchpad using Quick Theming.
In the UI Theme Designer select the custom theme for the editor.
Open Quick Theming to edit the Launchpad. Scroll down untill you reach the section
Tile.
To use a color defined in CSS Theming you only have to write the name of the color
defined in CSS into the text field.
Remember that you defined the color by the name grey in CSS.
Click into the text field next to Tile Background Color and fill in grey.
To add a color defined in the Color Palette click onto the color box nect to the text
field of Tile Icon Color.
The palette parameters you defined are displayed in the Palette section in the color
picker. Select reddish.
Note As you see by referencing a predefined color there are two ways to do it. Refer
to a color defined in the CSS Theming simply with its’s parameter name. Refer to a
color defined in the Palette by @ + parameter name.
Your launchpad should now look like the following image. Is this not the case click
on .
Task Change the default theme for the Fiori Launchpad. Time 15 Min.
Short Description In this step you will learn how to change the
theme of the Fiori Launchpad.
If you want to apply the theme to your Launchpad or other Fiori apps you have to
overwrite the current theme.
On the home page you will see the list of your custom themes. Make sure your theme
LEARN###Theme is selected.
You will see the warning under Status on the right side.
Open the Fiori Launchpad and log in with your username and
password.
You can see the theme you created is listed under Appearance. Choose it.
Click .