Keep the tab titles as short and meaningful as possible. Sort them according to the work flow from left to right.

As the advantage of tab strips consists of displaying all navigation possibilities at once, try not to define more tab titles than can be displayed. However, due to the complexity of R/3 transaction, this is not always possible.

If you define more tab titles than can be displayed, the user must scroll. For this purpose, the system automtically displays scroll buttons for horizontal scrolling at the upper right margin. To get a complete overview of all navigation targets, the user can call a list of all tab titles from a dialog menu (see Fig. 1).

The R/3 System does not support multiple-line tab titles. If multiple lines were used instead of the scroll buttons, due to the language dependency of the titles a different number of tab title lines would appear for each logon language. Since the tab page is of fixed size, the developer would have to save as many blank lines above the tab strip as might be needed under worst conditions. This would waste screen space and reduce readability.

If tab titles correspond to entries in the Goto or Options menus, delete these entries from the menus. The user must always be able to use the Goto menu to reach the screen that contains the tab strip.

For the duration of one processing session, the number as well as the contents of the tab titles should be the same.

The tab strip allows you to define icons as tab titles, however, only in combination with texts. If you used icons only, this would nullify the advantages of a transparent application structure stated above.

The Screen Painter locks the first line of a tab page, which the system needs to draw the tab titles. Otherwise, the layout rules for creating screens apply.

A tab strip requires three additional screen lines for the tab titles line, the lower border, and the locked first line.

A tab page together with the tab titles texts corresponds to a group box. Therefore, you need no further box that includes all fields of a tab page.

When converting: Fields that are grouped on old screens using group boxes receive no more box; use the old box title as tab title of the tab page.

However, you can use several group boxes on one tab page. In this case, make sure that the tab title contains a meaningful description of the groups of fields combined on the tab page.

You must provide a constant environment of the tab strip. This means that if you go from one tab page to another, the menu bar and the application bar must not change. For special functions that are active only on one tab page, you must, therefore, use pushbuttons, which you can position anywhere on the respective page. These functions must not appear in the menu.

Leave a blank line between the header data and the tab strip, as usual.