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Ujjal Gupta
September 19, 2018 5 minute read

How to change the label for standard !elds in

SuccessFactors PP3, MDF, Portlets, HomePage, Menus
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4 Likes 5,044 Views 4 Comments

Hi

In this blog I would want to show how in SuccessFactors Labels for Standard !elds can be
modi!ed as per client requirements. The !elds could be in PP3, MDF, Portlets, HomePage Tiles,
Menus and many more. We will not talk about Text Replacement here as it has very limited
options.

Firstly I would take a typical scenario which most of EC customers ask for changing the label of
e"ectiveStartDate !eld in MDFs(standard or custom) and in one of SAP KBA NOte(2646360) this
was marked as not doable!

Below is the screenshot of an E"ective Dated Custom MDF and I have highlighted the text which
comes for e"ectiveStartDate !eld and we will make use of 3-tier architecture of SF.
:
 So now to change this text, we need to take following steps:

Step 1 – Go to Provisioning of your instance and enable English Debug Language in Company
Settings

Step 2 – Now login back to the instance and click on Name Menu at right side of home page and
select Options

Step 3 – Go to Change Language and select English Debug and click on switch.
:
 Step 4 – Now system will take you to homepage where you would see lots of keywords, colons
and texts coming up for each system label, as below.

Step 5 – Now we will go to the same Custom MDF which I referred at the beginning of this blog

Please make a note here of the keyword which is highlighted in yellow between the two
colons and followed by standard text “When would you like your changes to take e"ect?”

Write down this Keyword for reference as we would need it during the next steps
:
 Step – 6 Now login back to provisioning and you would see a new option below SSO Settings
called as Manage Languages

Step 7 – Now click on Manage Languages and you see as below, you would !nd all the Active
languages in the system having three dots which shows di"erent actions available.(like shown
below for English US)

Step 8 – Now click on “Download default labels” and you would get a csv !le called Messages.csv
which would look like below
:
 Step 9 – Remember the keyword we took note at Step 5 – “ECT_PP3_EFFECTIVE_DATE_LABEL”,
Search this keyword in column A of Messages.csv !le and you would see the below result

You see this is the same text you saw in Step 5, in that MDF

Step 10 – Now create a New csv !le with same structure as Messages.csv !le and in column B,
you can replace the original text “When would you like your changes to take e"ect?” with the NEW
text “E"ective Date” and save the !le.

Step 11 – Now go back to Provisioning > Manage Languages and click on Add Custom Label
against the language where you want to do the change and give it a name referring as custom
language pack for that instance, as shown below:
:
 Step 12 – Now click on 3 dots and you would see below actions available against the new custom
language created. Please click on upload custom labels and upload the new Messages .csv !le
created in Step 10.

Step 13 – Once the !le is uploaded you will see below message in provisioning which will con!rm
the new !le is uploaded and saved for your instance.

Step 14 – Now you can go to your instance and change your language back to original English
US/UK and navigate to same MDF and you would see new text being shown now as E"ective
Date

BINGO!!! The Label for standard !eld in MDF(custom or standard) has got changed.

Some Important points of consideration I would like to share based on my experience

in using this setup which is called as 3 tier architecture for various clients:

Always give preference to use Text Replacement and other language related options to modify
the labels as your !rst option
Please always consider this(3 tier architecture) as the last option to make changes to the
standard labels
:
 Always ensure to upload all the custom labels going forward into you custom language pack,
else the new !le will overwrite the existing keyword changes in the instance.
Always check thoroughly the IMPACT of modifying the text for a particular keyword in one
screen, as it may have impact on multiple screens. For eg: The change we did as an example
here will be applicable to any standard or custom MDF which are e"ective dated. So I can’t use
a verbiage here speci!c only to a custom MDF as the change would impact all e"ective dated
MDF screens!
Changes of these nature are always complex and risky in nature so be wise in making decisions
around this and doing the changes and inform clients appropriately to make label change
related decisions.
There are chances that in future if any of the keyword changes post a release by SF, which you
modi!ed for your custom language. Those changes will be overwritten and you may need to
repeat these tasks( Although till date I have not experienced such cases in last 5 years)
Lastly this method is also useful during implementation with Multiple Languages and can be
used for client speci!c Translation in any other languages like French, Chinese, Spanish etc.

Below are few more examples of di"erent screens which would show the labels which
can be modi!ed:

Homepage

Work#ow
:
 Goal

Performance

Company Info
:
 Alert Moderator

Menus
Assigned tags

SAP SuccessFactors platform | SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central | SAP SuccessFactors Employee

Central - Employee Pro!le | SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals | SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting |

View more...

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Happy customization using standard ways!!

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4 Comments

You must be Logged on to comment or reply to a post.

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 Fuad Garayev

June 11, 2019 at 7:35 am

Thanks Ujjal for sharing. Additional if customer would like to add custom language with special
signs which csv could replace with "?" sign, then better to open it on notepad instead of excel.

Regards

Fuad

Like(0)

Ujjal Gupta | Post author

July 19, 2019 at 9:53 am

Hi Fuad, you should use open o$ce or any tool which helps you to keep those special characters
intact, instead of becoming "?".

Regards

Ujjal

Like(0)

Lopa Chakraborty

July 2, 2019 at 6:01 am

Good one

Like(1)

Vladimir Latyshenko

March 12, 2021 at 8:23 am

Nice job Ujjal!

I need to notice that now Manage Languages are moved to Admin Center. Also, there's other
:
 hardcoded tag for the Start Date of custom MDF objects - ECT_PP3_EFFECTIVE_AS_OF, - which is
visible onView of the portlet. Fortunately, the tag is displayed as E"ective as of
of.

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