What is a variant in SAP?

Whenever you start a program in which selection screens are defined, the system displays a set of input fields for database-specific and program-specific selections. To select a certain set of data, you enter an appropriate range of values. If you often run the same program with the same set of selections (for example, to create a monthly statistical report), you can save the values in a selection set called a variant.

You can also use variants to change the appearance of the selection screen by hiding selection criteria. This is particularly useful when you are working with large selection screens on which not all of the fields are relevant.

Reports, module pools, and function groups may have several selection screens. It is therefore possible to create a variant for more than one selection screen.

Variants are an interface between the user and the selection screen. They can be used both in dialog and in background mode, although their uses are slightly different.

When you want to execute a transaction in SAP, then there are certain fields present in the screen that comes after running the transaction. The sample data that you fill in the screen fields can be saved for future use. The saved data on a screen is called variant.

If you have done programming in any of the programming languages like C, C++, Java and you must be remembering that for testing our functionality we need to take input from the user and run the program. Don’t know about others but that functionality used to irritate me to enter again and again. While doing my final year project, i had a less as well as huge data to enter, so i used the functionality of reading from files. I used to store the test data in it and read it using I/O functions and therefore use the data in the program. This was a variant while checking the functionality.

In simple terms, variant is a simple saved data on an I/O screen of a program where you do only 2-3 click and the program is executed based on the data. In this way, you need to touch your keyboard for entering details everytime.

Variant is the set of values you would like as your selection criteria. In any SAP report, the first screen is the selection screen. You then select the values you would like the output in. It’s like filtering your output beforehand. But then you might need the ditto fields again sometime, with just a minor changes. So you save your selection criteria as VARIANT.

Set of pre defined data for a selection screen .

It is used to restrict the data selection based on the pre defined data. basically it filter the selection query