This blog contains experience gained over the years of implementing (and de-implementing) large scale IT applications/software.

Tag: Chrome

Easy SAP Note Opening

In a previous post about one of the great time-saving features of my free Power Notes Searcher browser extension for Chromium based browsers, I showed how to auto-save a SAP note to PDF with the note title and version as the PDF file name.

In this post, I’m going to show you another great set of features related to opening SAP notes.

The Power Note Searcher has a massive 6 methods to open a SAP note, depending on how the note number(s) is/are input. Let’s go through each of them. I think you’re going to like this.

1. Enter a Note Number in the Popup

The first method is the simplest. You just enter the note number directly into the extension popup by clicking the extension icon in the browser toolbar, enter the note number and ticking “Open note number(s)“:

Notice that we specifically have text that says “number(s)”. This is because in the input box you can enter upto 10 note numbers separated by spaces, and Power Notes Searcher will open all 10 in new tabs:

A great tip, is that you can just paste text into this note number input box, and the extension will parse upto 10 note numbers directly out of the text. Any text, copied from anywhere!

2. Open Notes by Typing in the Omnibox

In Google Chrome, the Omnibox is the search text input, the URL display, the command entry box. It’s the all-in-one text entry area where a web page URL is usually displayed.

The Power Notes Searcher lets you open multiple note numbers from this omnibox using the keyword “note” followed by a space or tab.

Enter “note”:

Enter a tab or a space and the Power Notes Searcher extension is activated and ready to receive the space separated list of upto 10 note numbers:

3. Double Clicking Highlighted Note Numbers

When you have the Power Notes Searcher “Highlight Note Numbers” option turned on, then note numbers (or what are perceived as note numbers) on the SAP note pages and also in the note search results pages, are highlighted in Yellow (unread), and Green (read and in the history list):

Even though these are not hyperlinks, the Power Notes Searcher allows you to double click on them to open them in a new tab. How cool is that!

4. Highlighting Numbers and Opening

Another method to open multiple notes, is to highlight any note numbers on any page (any web page on the internet), then with the numbers highlighted, right click to open the Power Notes Searcher context menu, and select “Open note:”:

A great tip on this feature, you can just highlight the whole text including the note number and the extension will parse upto 10 note numbers.

You will also notice the “Parse note numbers to clipboard” menu item. This allows you to highlight any text on any web page and extract upto 10 note numbers directly out of the text and places them into the clipboard:

5. Open Notes from History

You will notice the SAP notes that you have opened, are recorded in the Power Notes Searcher history list, sorted in descending accessed date/time order:

Clicking the note number will open the link. Clicking the PDF icon will open the PDF version of the note.

Hint: There are a number of other hidden features on the popup, which I will run through on another post.

6. Open Notes from History Export

The final method of opening SAP notes in the Power Notes Searcher, is from the history export.

With the popup open, click the “Export…” link in the bottom left:

The export page opens. The export page has been designed so that you can highlight the whole list and copy to clipboard for pasting directly into Excel:

This concludes our journey around some of the features of the Power Notes Searcher. There are a few more features (as if that lot wasn’t enough) which I will run through on another blog post.

As a parting reminder, if you find the tool useful, please leave a review on the Google Extensions page and share the usefulness with your SAP colleagues.

As a reminder, here’s the link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/power-notes-searcher/djddlngbcgphkahmilapbfppblobpkfm

Enjoy!

Chrome 72 “bug” workaround for Power Notes Searcher

A recent Chrome experimental feature delivered in Chrome 72 is affecting the functionality of Chrome Extensions where the extension utilises some of the Chrome APIs to trigger actions depending on web requests.
This is noted as bug 931588 on the Chromium project issues list.

For users of my free Power Notes Searcher – Google Chrome Extension for SAP professionals, you could be affected.

What versions of Chrome are affected:

The main stable version of Chrome 72 is affected.

What are the symptoms:

On a SAP note page, if when you right click the page and select -> “Power Notes Searcher -> Auto-save Note as PDF”, my extension’s handy SAP note PDF re-name feature, does not seem to work.

Instead of the downloaded PDF being downloaded and saved as “<note-number>_<note-title>_v<version>.pdf”, the default filename is given.

Is there a workaround:
Yes, you need to disable the Chrome experimental feature “Network Service”.
Go to “chrome://flags” in a new Chrome tab, then find and set to “Disabled” the “Enable network service” item.

This will temporarily fix the issue until Google roll-out a fix to Chrome.
Another option is to switch to using “Chrome Beta” but this could give you other issues.

chrome://flags  to disable the “enable network service” feature.

Power Notes Searcher Updated to v2.0

I’ve finally managed to update the Power Notes Searcher to v2.0, which now supports the new SAP ONE support portal.
This is my free Google Chrome Extension to make life easier if you have to wade through a lot of SAP notes on a regular basis.  This is my tried and trusted tool for 3 years now and it was time to provide an update.

Whilst the main features of Power Notes Searcher remain the same, a few notable features are:

– Highlighted note numbers can now be double clicked to open the note, even if it’s not an actual HTML link.
– Increased the history size to 150 notes.
–  Smaller code base due to the use of the Google code compiler for JavaScript.
– Note content searches now highlight the note numbers without needing to initiate the search through the Power Notes Searcher popup.
– Collapsable settings area, simplifies the screen layout and increases viewing area for the history table.

I’ve also installed some basics into the code to provide for a future “tag” feature to allow notes to be tagged and organised in the history table.

Power Notes Searcher Updated to v1.2

First off, a Happy New Year to you!

During the festivities, I’ve managed to squeeze in a little time to make a couple of modifications to the Power Notes Searcher.  My free Google Chrome Extension for searching for SAP notes and helping you organise the SAP notes you find.

The changes include 1 fix to the Google Font API link which was no longer working due to Google’s move to ensure that it’s infrastructure is accessed via HTTPS.
I’ve also included some enhancements to the list of hard SAP links to useful areas of the SAP support site, such as the Support Package Stack schedule and the SL Toolset (for SUM and SWPM).
I also adjusted the link to the SWDC so that it now uses the new support.sap.com site (instead of the old service.sap.com).

As a bonus, I increased the number of note tabs that can be opened in one go, from 5 to 10.
This means that entering 10 SAP notes into the search box (or omni box), will open all of them.
Finally, I increased the number of allowed SAP notes in the history, from 50 to 100.
I found that on a regular project for 1 system installation, I was regularly exceeding the 50 note limit.

With regards to up & coming features, well I originally meant to include the ability to tag notes listed in the history.  This would provide a way of saving favourite notes, plus saving specific notes as a project set or collection.
The initial core code for storing tags against notes is already built in, I just need to spend some time around the peripheral code creating the interface etc.  Let’s hope I can get this done in the next few months.

In case you’ve not installed the extension, you can see the details here on the Google Chrome Extensions Web Store (or from the link on my initial blog post here).