TOOLTIP, as in any other places in on your PC, is responsible to show short info about the column when you hover your mouse over the column header. It’s very useful when you have a lots of fields in you grid and you’re optimizing the width of the column by minimizing the description of the column itself. It is common behaviour for example for checkboxes or for icon columns. In this case the Tooltip is very helpful for explaining the user the meaning of the column.

Figure 81 ZDEMO_AIN_CL34 Tooltip of an column

Additionally if you’ll not use SELTEXT field, then the value from TOOLTIP will be used as description used to describe the column in the change layout screen.

Figure 82 ZDEMO_AIN_CL34 ABAP Code for Tooltip

Figure 83 ZDEMO_AIN_CL34 Change layout screen

SELTEXT is one of the fields that are linked to the texts of the grid columns. This particular one is responsible for displaying the name of the column in the change/display of layout popup.

Figure 79 ZDEMO_AIN_CL33 Column description in the layout popup

In case the TOOLTIP field is empty, the value from SELTEXT will be also used as tooltip and will appear when you hover the mouse over the column in the grid.

Figure 80 ZDEMO_AIN_CL33 SELTEXT as a TOOLTIP

Conversion Exit was already mentioned while describing the EDIT_MASK field, but here it is called in a bit different way. Before saying how, it is important to understand the conversion exits. They are no more and no less than a function modules that helps to represent the internal values into understandable or more readable values. An basic example is field MATNR which is 18 characters long in ECC and 40 in S/4 HANA, and if it contains only numbers (for example 123),  then the internal value is stored with leading zeros, for example 000000000000000123 in ECC system. As you can imagine reading 123 is easier than 000000000000000123, that’s why field MATNR uses conversion exit ALPHA which deletes the leading zeros in case there are only numbers inside the fields.

There are many standard conversion exits, you can find the by searching of FM that begins with CONVERSION_EXIT_*. You’ll notice that after the second underscore there is a five characters name of the conversion exit, and then _INPUT or _OUTPUT. _INPUT and _OUTPUT describes if the FM is responsible for converting external value into internal (INPUT) or form internal value into external (OUTPUT).

Figure 75 Search of Conversion Exits

In the example program ZDEMO_AIN_CL32 I’ve setup column CONNID to use conversion exit NUMCV. As you see you don’t put the full name of the FM into the CONVEXIT field, it only assumes to get the 5 characters describing the name of the exit. It knows automatically that for output it needs to use CONVERSION_EXIT_NUMCV_OUPUT and for input (in case of editable fields) CONVERSION_EXIT_NUMCV_INPUT.

Figure 76 ZDEMO_AIN_CL32 Conversion Exit NUMCV for field CONNID

When you run the program you can select if you want to see the CONNID with or without conversion exit. In case you want to see it with it, the values of the field will be represented with leading zeros. You may be wondering why it is opposite when you don’t use conversion exit as the internal value in the database is with leading zeros. For some of the types (like NUMC) the output is always done without leading zeros, so if you want to explicitly set to see them, you need to use conversion exits.

Figure 77 ZDEMO_AIN_CL32 Output with Conversion Exit NUMCV

The next figure shows the output without the conversion exit.

Figure 78 ZDEMO_AIN_CL32 Output without Conversion Exit NUMCV

OUTPUTLEN can be used to setup the width of the column (if you don’t use automatic column width optimization). When automatically created, usually it have the value of the maximum field width, but when you create it manually you can setup it to whatever value you want.

Figure 72 ZDEMO_AIN_CL31 Output length for field CITYFROM

My experience shows that it is useful when you have a field that have maximum length of few characters but the description of the column is long. In such case with OUTPUTLEN you can decide if you want to adjust the column width to the width of the value or to the width of column description.

Below some examples of the different settings of the OUTPUTLEN for the field CITYFROM.

Figure 73 ZDEMO_AIN_CL31 Output length set to 3 for column CITYFROM

Figure 74 ZDEMO_AIN_CL31 Output length set to 6 for column CITYFROM