Tile

A tile is configuration, not code. Its life cycle runs in five steps:

1. An administrator defines the tile in a technical catalog: title, subtitle, icon, keywords and the intent it fires (semantic object, action and optional parameters).
2. A business catalog references the tile, and the catalog is assigned to a role.
3. An administrator places the tile in a section of a page, or a user adds it through the app finder.
4. At runtime, a dynamic tile calls its OData service and overwrites the configured values with the returned data, such as a count of open items.
5. When the user clicks, the tile fires its intent, and the launchpad resolves that intent through a target mapping.

Nothing in these steps loads the application itself until step 5 has found a target. A tile is therefore a labeled trigger for an intent, not a container for an app.

Two settings deserve attention on dynamic tiles. The refresh interval is entered in seconds: 0 reads the data once when the page loads, values between 1 and 9 fall back to 10 seconds, and 10 or more are used as entered. The service is called from the page of every user who sees the tile. SAP documents custom tile types as being in maintenance mode and points to cards in SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition as their successor. Any tile can also be displayed as a link, which is useful when the app needs no extra information on the page. Choosing the simplest tile type that does the job keeps a page fast and predictable.

• Launchpad App Manager (/UI2/FLPAM): the current tool for original tiles. It packages one target mapping and one or more tiles into a launchpad app descriptor item, which always belongs to a technical catalog. Static, dynamic and news tiles are created here.
• Adaptation mode: for SAP-delivered tiles, fields such as title, subtitle, icon, keywords and refresh interval can be adapted directly in the SAP technical catalog, cross-client, instead of copying the tile.
• Launchpad Content Manager (/UI2/FLPCM_CUST): adds references to existing tiles to business catalogs; it cannot create or change original tiles.
• Launchpad Designer: deprecated; SAP still names it as the tool for custom tile types.
• SAP BTP: apps describe their navigation targets as inbounds in the app descriptor, and SAP Build Work Zone uses these inbounds when it adds the app to its content.
• Public Edition: the ABAP tools above are not documented for customer use; check the SAP Help Portal for the supported way to add tiles there.

Tiles are maintained once as originals and reused everywhere else as references.

A tile answers "where does the user click?"; a target mapping answers "which app opens?". In the Launchpad App Manager the two are created together in one launchpad app descriptor item, but they remain separate objects:

• Tile only: valid for apps of type URL, which need no target mapping.
• Target mapping only: valid for apps reached from other apps (app-to-app navigation) rather than from the page.
• Matching: the Launchpad Content Manager shows a tile and a target mapping as one combination when they share the same intent and sit in the same catalog. At runtime, the launchpad only needs the same intent; the target mapping can come from a different catalog in the user's roles.

SAP still recommends keeping a tile and its target mapping together in the same business catalog, because separating them is a common source of navigation errors. A tile without a reachable target mapping is a button that leads nowhere.

Separate visibility problems from navigation problems:

1. Tile missing on the page and in the app finder: the business catalog that references it is not in the user's roles.
2. Tile in the app finder but not on the page: the catalog is assigned but the tile was never placed on a page in the user's spaces. The page editor flags tiles that are unavailable for a role with an error state.
3. Tile missing only on a phone or tablet: the app does not support that device type.
4. Tile visible but click fails: no matching target mapping. Run /UI2/FLIA for the user before changing content.
5. Dynamic tile shows no number: the OData service behind the tile is not active or not authorized for the user; the Launchpad Content Manager can display service activation status per app.

A frequent mistake is copying an SAP tile into a custom catalog just to change its title, which disconnects it from future SAP updates; adaptation mode avoids that. Most tile problems trace back to catalogs and roles, not to the tile definition.