Transaction SE16 – Adding additional parameter fields for selecting data

This article shows a way to customize the list of selection criteria within SAP® transaction SE16 by adding additional fields. It is a little trick which can make your life easier if you need to look at table content in SAP regularly.

In SAP it is possible to list records of a certain table using T-Code SE16 (the „Data Browser“). This has already been described by a colleague of mine in the article “Formats for downloading from SAP (SE16)”.

Standard Selection Parameters in SE16

Now, there might be situations where you do not want to list the complete content of a table (= all records) but only a subset which corresponds to certain criteria. When calling transaction SE16 and entering a certain table name you will get to a selection screen. This screen contains a list of parameters which can be used for limiting the data accordingly.

Example:

The following picture shows T-Code SE16 for table „LFA1“, which represents the global vendor master data (e.g. vendor number, name, address etc.).

The fields which are displayed as parameters can be used for limiting the to-be-displayed data, for example by entering:

• a range of vendor numbers
• creation dates
• other available options

Adding Your Own Selection Fields

However sometimes you might want to filter data according to parameters which are not offered upfront. As an example it could be interested to look for “Alternative payees in the document”, a topic which has been explained by my colleague Martin Riedl in detail some time ago already in his article “Alternative payee in document at SAP vendor invoices”.

Technically speaking as described in his blog post such vendors can be identified by looking at the field „Alternative Payee in Document“ (Technical field name „XZEMP“) which contains an „X“ if an alternative payee can be entered.

Looking at our selection screen above, SAP does not offer that field as parameter there. Luckily this is not difficult to solve:

• Menu: “Settings -> Fields for Selection”

• A dialog appears which lists all fields of table LFA1. The selected ones are used as parameters for selecting the data.

• In our example we want to add the „Alternative Payee“ as parameter. To do so, we tick the field XZEMP accordingly and confirm with “OK”.

In the next picture we see the new parameter which has been added. All vendors where the “Alternative Payee” field is flagged with an “X” do have that setting activated and can be used for entering an alternative payee when entering for example an invoice. In our example this is the case for 331 vendors.

Conclusion

Maybe you have not been aware of the option to enhance the SE16 selection screen by adding your own fields for selection. Usually the “workflow” when using it starts with identifying interesting attributes in context of your analytic work or audit tasks, then adding those as parameters in the data browser and checking how often such constellations do appear in your data. I hope this article was interesting and helpful to you.