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Additional Information for Maintaining Infosets

In addition to maintaining functional areas, you can define additional table fields and additional fields.

This allows you to assign additional fields which are not available in the standard system to an infotype and then incorporate these in functional areas.

Table fields (additional tables):

In the SAP system, data is often stored in tables. For example, long texts (online help) for the different fields are stored in language-dependent tables.

When running a query, you may want to display the long text for a particular field along with its code (e.g. the company code name for the company code) since you may not be familiar with the code.

However, you can display these long texts only if you have linked the table containing these texts to the functional area. Only then can you integrate the table field containing the long text in a functional group of the area.

Additional fields:

You may want to use table fields of the logical database or fields of additional tables in certain calculations, and store the result of these calculations in 'additional' fields.

You can, for example, calculate the age of an employee using the birth date stored in the system. Please note that you must program a routine to perform this calculation.

In HR, there are different ways of integrating table fields and additional fields in functional areas:

On the Change functional area <name> screen, you can define additional fields and link additional tables. These additional fields and tables are then only valid for this functional area.
In this way, you can add new table fields and/or additional fields to an existing functional area.
The procedure used here is the same as for all other applications. Detailed documentation can be found in the R/3 library under Basis -> ABAP/4 Development Workbench -> ABAP/4 Query.
In HR, you can also assign table fields to and define additional fields for several functional areas. However, this requires modification of the SAP standard system.
Assign an infotype to each additional field and table field. (The infotype assignment must be unique so that additional and table fields can be integrated in a functional area).
When you integrate the infotype in a functional area, all additional and table fields of this infotype are then automatically integrated in the functional area and assigned to a functional group. The new additional and table fields are then valid for all functional areas containing this infotype.
Please note
Additional fields which have been assigned to certain infotypes using this procedure cannot be subsequently integrated in existing functional areas.
The HR procedure for assigning table fields and defining additional fields for several functional areas is described in the following sections.