SAP GUI for JAVA - Search Help ALV display

Question

I need to be able to display search helps in the ALV grid format or the ' Dialog Modal ' option as seen on the <b>Settings for all F4 helps</b> tab under the personalize option for search helps.
Currently when I am using a Macintosh machine the system ignores the system setting and my personal settings and displays all search results in an ABAP List format. Unfortunately the ABAP list format does not work correctly when used to input a field on another ABAP list report.
This behaviour can be found on the Mozilla Firefox browser when SAP GUI for HTML and the SAP GUI for JAVA.
Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi Rolf-Martin,
Thank you for your detailed explanation on how the ALV grid control is implemented for the SAP GUI for Java.  This has been pretty insightful.  The good news is that I finally figured out a solution to my problem.  You see I inherited an old custom program where an ABAP list is used as an interactive data capture screen with input fields.  Well a couple of fields had search helps. The program has worked fine with the regular SAP GUI until a MAC OS user tried to use it with the SAP GUI for Java.  Whenever they selected a line from the search help it would bring back the entire onto their input screen.
A sample of the code:
form search_help.
    CALL FUNCTION 'F4IF_FIELD_VALUE_REQUEST'
       EXPORTING
            TABNAME     = 'EKPO'
            FIELDNAME   = 'MATNR'
            SEARCHHELP                = 'ZMAT1_A'
            SHLPPARAM                 = 'MATNR'
       TABLES
            RETURN_TAB       = RET_TABLE.
IF NOT RET_TABLE-FIELDVAL IS INITIAL.
   LINXX-XMATNR = RET_TABLE-FIELDVAL.
   MODIFY CURRENT LINE FIELD VALUE XMATNR FROM LINXX-XMATNR. " ****
ENDIF.
SET CURSOR 9 SY-CUROW.   " ********
endform.
The problem was being caused by the fact that the search help ABAP list was overriding the sy-XXXX values for the current line contents, index, pageno, cursor row for the calling ABAP list. So when a user selected a row from the search help this would now become the current context and be transferred back to the calling program. 
The fix was pretty simple; all I had to do was save the current line context and the context prior to calling the search help.  After the search help was run I would then replace the current line with the saved one in my local variable.  I hope this makes sense. We now have a couple of happy MAC OS users.
Once again I thank you for your patience and support in  this matter.
Have a great day,
Edwin.