SAP Blogs: SAP enterprise portal application development

Showing posts with label SAP enterprise portal application development. Show all posts

Saturday, July 2

Knowledge Management

Personalizing Your Portal
Delegated Administration

Administrative Aspects of SAP Enterprise Portal

This post discusses the administrative aspects, authoring and deployment of a custom SAP Enterprise Portal. SAP Enterprise Portal is a scalable portal which can integrate unlimited content because it has open architecture. Portal content can be integrated from various sources such as groupware applications, Web sites, enterprise applications, legacy systems, databases, and document directories.

SAP Enterprise portal provides complete set of tools to manage and monitor and administer the SAP EP within one coherent environment. These administrative tools are created as portal pages or iViews enabling you to do administration tasks according to a particular business scenario.

After Installation and delegation of tasks, portal administrator tools are used to either import or create custom portal content. After that roles are built. These roles consist of specific subsets. Each subset consist of specific portal content. These subsets are assigned to various enterprise users.

There are various services and procedures that are indirectly involved in distribution to portal users and information processing for portal users. These services may include security, monitoring the portal server, user management, and changing the portal design to reflect a company’s brand.

Also Knowledge Management platform can be implemented. KM allows portal users to intuitively and selectively target documents and files and at distributed information sources.

SAP Unification Server helps in integrating the resources of a enterprise's information systems. Also it provides unified access to structured data of the enterprise. It drives the unification of databases, enterprise applications and legacy systems in SAP Enterprise Portal.

Page Builder
Knowledge Management
CM Components
TREX Components
Unification
Connectors
Personalizing Your Portal
Delegated Administration

Tuesday, May 24

SAP EP - Standard Portal Services

After reading this post, you will be able to answer the following questions.

What are available services in portal runtime?

What are the key components of user management engine ?

How to use the UM API to work with the user, group and role objects ?

What is the architecture of connector framework ?

How to use the connector gateway to connect to R/3 System and to RDBMS ?

Some of the Public Services of Portal Runtime are :

Logger:
This service is used to diagnose problems and to return detailed information
about the problems identified. Depending on the target user, it is possible to define
simple or more complex logging. The logger provides a set of convenient methods for generating log messages.

JCo client service:
To connect to SAP Systems using RFC connections.

HTML Business for Java:
HTML Business for Java provides the user with an efficient set of controls, similar to JavaSwing. The controls are based on servlets and JSP pages. The developer uses bean-like components or JSP tags. Renderer classes translate the components into HTML commands.

User Mapping:
User has different IDs in different systems. This service maps them all.

User Management:
User Information from the portal

Navigation:
Custom Navigation IViews or Hierarchies.

Xsltransform:
API for transforming XLS to XML document

jcoclient:
Manage JCO Client access by implementing pooling and session timeout/logoff detection

Application Contentconverter:
Provides Factories to convert RSS to HTML and XML to HTML.

Application Contentconversion:
The Content Type Conversion Service offers API to add content converter capabilities to the response process.
Admin Logviewer:
search, filter, browser, download log files of the Platform.

Admin Logadmin:
manage logger configuration of the Platform.

EPCF Toolbox:
Java classes for EPCF integration

Useragent:
User-Agent (Browser) detection plus affiliation checker

System Landscape: Get information about the system landscape iView Service: iViews/Pages/Systems semantic layer

What is UME ? UME is the central storage place for user and role information of all Java and ABAP applications that use UME. Persistence manager is responsible for writing the data to and reading the data from the correct data source. The application is unaware from which data source is the data being read or written to.

Various sources of data storage for UME are possible. Some are : SAP R/3 system, LDAP, Database etc.

It may happen that that the data source which is being used by UME is also required by some other system like SRM. In such a case a replication of the user information present at the persistence has to be made. This task is handled by the replication manager.

Two main packages in which almost all of the APIs of UME are covered is :

Com.sap.security.api and com.sap.security.api.acl

IUser, IGroup and Irole are present in com.sap.security.api. Also UMFactory and IUserAccount are present in this package.

IAcl and IAclManager are present in the com.sap.security.api.acl.

User Management factory

Applications can access all the functionality of UME through com.sap.security.api.UMFactory

Various other factories can be obtained from the UMFactory.

UME Objects are identified by Unique IDs. IUserFActory can be used to create, delete, search users. Also you can perform mass commit/rollback on a set of users The Iuser Object contains all the information about a user. Name, UniqueID, LDAP attributes, display name etc.

If you want to Modify a User Information, Use the IUserMaint Object. By using the Iuser, you can obtain information about the logged in user. Also you can obtain information about another User. You can obtain information about other User if you know UniueID of the user.

For more information methods of IUserFactory and Iuser APIs,Visit Methods of IuserFactory and Iuser APIs

Related Articles:

Portal Eventing and Navigation
Portal Look and Feel - Branding the Portal
How to Develop Portal Applications
SAP EP-Developing portal content and assigning permissions
SAP EP-Role maintenance
SAP EP-How to make Enterprise Portal highly available
SAP Material Management Introduction
SAP EP-J2EE architechture

Friday, April 22

How to Develop Portal Applications

Apart from standard components and services provided by SAP, Developers can develop custom components and custom services for providing custom content and custom processing. These services and components can make use of hundreds of standard SAP provided components and services like creating navigation links, transforming XML content and client side eventing.

When we develop a portal application, we must know beforehand that what are portal administrators going to use it for. There are 2 steps one must follow to create a portal application:

· Run NWDS and use enterprise portal perspective.

· Create an enterprise portal project and add components and services, create a PAR file and upload it on the portal.

We can use any of the following technology to build a portal application:

Portal Runtime: Portal runs on portal runtime. PRT also provide infrastructure to develop portal components which provide HTML for display purpose. Also PRT is used for creating portal services which provide functionality to components and other services.

Web Dynpro: Web dynpro comes in 2 flavours, web dynpro ABAP and web dynpro Java. One can build UI using web dynpro and deploy it on portal. This is the preferred method of creating portal applications.

I shall explain web dynpro ABAP and web dynpro Java development in detail later in upcoming porsts on this blog.

In order to develop applications in portal, you need to know basic things like HTML and servlet programming and JSP.

Tasks that can be performed in portal application perspective are:

· Perspective configuration

· Portal application project creation

· Importing JAR and PAR files

· Check Web services

· Working with NWDI

Perspective configuration

Once the portal application is created, developer needs to upload its PAR file to the portal from NWDS EP perspective. For this, EP perspective must know the installation information of the portal to which Portal application is to be uploaded.

In NWDS go to Window ® Preferences ® SAP Enterprise Portal ® Application Development Studio. There are various checkboxes available to configure the EP Plug-in. Select the checkboxes, as needed.

Portal application project creation

Create a new portal application project

Select the menu File ® New ® Project… ® Portal Applications ® Create a Portal Application Project Specify the project name etc. That’s it.

Create a new portal service

Select the menu File ® New ® Other…

select Portal Application ® Create a new Portal Application Object, click Next

Select the project in which you want to create the service, click Next.

Select Portal Service to be created, click Next.

Enter the service name etc.

That’s it.

Create new portal component

Select the menu File ® New ® Other…

Select Portal Application ® Create a new Portal Application Object, click Next

Select project in which you would like to create the component, click Next.

Select Portal Component ® AbstractPortalComponent, click Next.

Enter the component name etc. That’s it.

SAP Blogs

Pages