Creating View Clusters
A view cluster is a group of maintenance dialogs which are collected in one maintenance unit for business or technical reasons. They allow related data in more than one table/view to be maintained consistently.
Whereas only 1:1 relationships can be processed in maintenance views (except for language-dependent texts), key extensions and relationships of cardinality N:M can also be handled in view clusters. Maintenance dialogs with no key, or partial key-dependence, can also be combined into view clusters.
Grouping dialogs into one maintenance unit has the following advantages for data maintenance:
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Navigation: A view cluster contains convenient standard navigation between the individual maintenance dialogs. This simplifies the maintenance of the data in a view cluster.
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Consistency: The view cluster ensures data consistency when deleting, copying, saving, retrieving, and manually transporting data. For example when an entry in a higher-level view is deleted, it automatically ensures that all dependent entries in lower-level views are also deleted.
You can first split tables with a lot of fields into various views and then collect them into a view cluster.
Use tabs to format very wide tables with a lot of fields.
Navigation in a view cluster is usually based on the hierarchy of the tables/views on which the dialogs are based. A view cluster usually consists of one or more root dialogs and the at most 14 maintenance dialogs which depend on them. A view at a lower level has one or more additional fields in its key compared its higher-level view. Each data record at the higher level has several dependent data records below it.
Each maintenance dialog is an independent unit consisting of an overview screen or an overview and a detail screen, depending on the dialog type. As well as the data to be maintained, the overview screen contains a navigation area, in which you can go to higher or lower level maintenance dialogs.
One-level maintenance dialogs only contain one screen, the list screen, in which all existing data records are displayed in a table. In a two-level maintenance dialog, double-clicking on a data record in the list screen takes you to the detail screen, which displays all the fields in the selected data record.
Generate a maintenance dialog for each view before you call the cluster maintenance (SM34). When you generate the maintenance dialog, flag the key fields which are identical in the view and its higher-level in the cluster, with the maintenance attribute S. Then switch to transaction SE54 to define a view cluster.