Category Archives: SAP

Presentation SITMUC 2018

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Event information

  • Location: SITMUC 2018, Einstein Kultur
  • Date: 13.10.2018
  • Site: Event website
  • Title: Creating apps with UI5
  • Presentation: PDF

Additional information

  • Make sure to select a language that supports the team, not just you.
  • App development is not just coding: that’s why the presentation is about creating apps. It’s a team effort.
  • Demo apps are mostly for myself and to make my life easier
  • Cognitive Leave Request was developed by BridgingIT in partnership with Microsoft. More information about the project: Tobias und Martin entwickeln. (Video in German)
  • Testing is important. Several tools from and for UI5 are available that can be used or other tools. Just use them if you can.
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Presentation UI5Con 2019

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Event information

  • Location: UI5Con 2019, SAP ROT03
  • Date: 28.06.2019
  • Site: Event website
  • Title: More than Code
  • Presentation: PDF

Additional information

  • Fruit Checker App is not a productive app. It is a showcase with the intention to make people think about the possibilities: what can you do today, value that combination of services can bring, etc.
  • OData v4 is not feature complete. SAP is investing and constantly adding new features to OData v4 model.
  • Testing is important. Several tools from and for UI5 are available that can be used or other tools. Just use them if you can.
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Presentation 3. HANA Tech Nights

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Event information

  • Location: MAFINEX-Technologiezentrum, Mannheim
  • Date: 01.10.2019
  • Site: SAP Community Wiki, Meetup.com
  • Title: ABAP is DEAD – long live CAPM
  • Presentation: PDF

Additional information

  • EOL for NetWeaver 31.12.2025 is for the on premise version, as listed by SAP PAM.
  • S/4HANA is running on NetWeaver ABAP, therefore, ABAP will stay the base technology for SAP.
  • CAP and RAP helps you to keep the core clean. To make this possible for all SAP customers, the options you have a independent of the technology skills the developers have: Java, JavaScript, ABAP.
  • Fiori Elements or “pure” Fiori app development: this is not either nor situation, both are valid and can complement each other. Important is to have the backend services made ready for Fiori; as SAP does since the beginning for their official Fiori Apps.
  • Fruit Checker App is not a productive app. It is a showcase with the intention to make people think about the possibilities: what can you do today, value that combination of services can bring, etc.
  • Possibilities CAP may offer depend solely on SAP. It’s their product and its features and roadmap are controlled 100% by SAP.
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Presentation SITWDF 2019

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Event information

  • Location: SAP Inside Track Walldorf, SAP ROT03
  • Date: 26.01.2019
  • Site: Event website
  • Title: Creating apps with UI5
  • Presentation: PDF

Additional information

  • App development is not just coding: that’s why the presentation is about creating apps. It’s a team effort.
  • OData can now also designed and documented in Swagger (OpenAPI).
  • Demo apps are mostly for myself and to make my life easier
  • Cognitive Leave Request was developed by BridgingIT in partnership with Microsoft. More information about the project: Tobias und Martin entwickeln. (Video in German)
  • Testing is important. Several tools from and for UI5 are available that can be used or other tools. Just use them if you can.
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Import OVA as Proxmox VM

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OVA is a virtual appliance, ready to run on a hypervisor. With an OVA file, you can import the image into VirtualBox, VMWare, etc and all needed information is loaded from the file and you can start the VM. This works as long as your hypervisor is capable of reading an OVA file. Proxmox does not understand OVA, and you cannot use the image out of the box. Reading the provided VM definition is not possible. As an OVA file contains the VM disk, you can add the disk to a VM.

First, create a new virtual machine definition in Proxmox. You are going to import the disk image from the ova file, not the virtual machine definition. Therefore, you must first create a VM, this creates the necessary information in Proxmox, and then you are adding a disk to this VM.

The overall steps to add OVA image to Proxmox are :

  1. Create VM
  2. Delete associated disk
  3. Import OVA
  4. Assign OVA to VM

Create a new VM definition

In Proxmox, add a new VM. Note the VM ID. You need this later when importing the OVA disk.

Go through the wizard to create a normal new VM.

It seems that you have to add a disk. The disk will be deleted later, the configuration entered here is not important.

I’ll use a CPU with 2 cores.

I am using the VM for SAP HXE, therefore I am going to use a little bit more RAM: 24 GB RAM in total.

After going through the wizard, the VM definition is ready and you can let Proxmox create the VM.

The new VM will appear in the list of available VMs in your server. Note the ID: 101 and the available storage locations.

Delete associated disk

Open the VM configuration and got to Hardware. The disk you added in the wizard is listed. This disk must be removed.

Remove the disk

  1. Detach from VM

Select the disk and click on Detach. The disk state will change to unused.

  1. Remove disk from VM

After the disk is detached, remove it from the VM. This will delete the disk file.

Import OVA

The next step is to import the OVA disk and assign it to the VM. As Proxmox uses LVM for managing its storage, a provided tool must be used to import the disk to LVM and assign it to the VM. Copy ova file to Proxmox server. Unzip OVA file. OVA is a zip file, you can simply unzip it to see its content. It contains the VM definition (ovf) and the vm disk (vmdk).

tar -xzvf hxexsa.ova

To import the image, you need to specify the VM and location where the disk is imported to. This information is available in Proxmox. You can see a list when looking at the server at the left menu. I am going to use local-lvm and VM HXE with id 101.

qm importdisk 101 hxexsa-disk1.vmdk local-lvm -format qcow2

This starts the import process. Basically, the vmdk file is copied to the storage local-lvm. After the import finishes, the disk is listed in Proxmox.

Assign OVA to VM

The disk is now available in Proxmox and added to the VM, but not usable. The disk must be assigned to the VM. To do so, open the VM definition and go to hardware.

Click on Edit.

Here you can specify how the disk is accessed by the VM. SCSI should work. If you get errors, try IDE, etc. As result, the disk is added to VM and can be used.

Note: SAP HANA Express Edition

To get the disk shipped with SAP HXE working, I had to use SATA, not SCSI.

Add the disk as SATA.

Make sure the boot order is set to SATA.

Starting the server should now work and you should see the configuration dialog.

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How to publish an iOS App from Microsoft AppCenter to Apple App Store Connect

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In this blog I will detail how you use Microsoft’s AppCenter to build an iOS app und publish it directly to iTunes Connect. This allows you to decouple the building, testing and distribution process from the developers. The developer only has to push the app to the repository (I am using Azure DevOps) and AppCenter takes care of the rest.

The steps to do so are:

  1. Create app project
  2. Configure build
  3. Add signing certificates
  4. Configure distribution to iTunes Connect

Create App Project

Open AppCenter and create a new project.

You can add AppCenter features to you app, but it’s optional. I already have a running app that I just want to build and distribute. Next step is to configure the build.

Build

Select the repository where the source code is hosted. I use Azure DevOps (free tier). Unfortunately, GitLab is not listed and in the free tier I am using it is not possible to add self-hosted git repositories.

AppCenter will connect to Azure DevOps via SSO and list the available projects.

This adds the repository to the build configuration. You’ll see the branches and last commit message.

To configure the build, click on the configuration option for the branch. The option will only appear when you hover with your mouse over the branch.

AppCenter will scan the project and find the available XCode settings.

You can configure the XCode version to be used for the build. This is very useful when you are using external libraries that do not work with newer XCode versions. For instance, the Fiori libraries included in my project were not released for 10.2.1 and the newer Swift version that comes with it. Therefore, the build exited with an error. Until SAP released an updated version of Fiori for iOS, I had to use XCode 10.2.

AppCenter offers options to automatically increase the build number, or run your XCTests.

Sign build

To be able to send the app to iTunes, you must sign the build using your certificate and provisioning profile. I wrote two blogs on how to get these:

When you have these available, you can start configuring the app signing. You upload the files and provide needed credentials for your private key.

Distribute

Next step is to define where you want to distribute the app to. You can send it to the official App Store, App Store Connect Users for your TestFlight beta testers, or to an internal Company Portal.

I am going to distribute the app to App Store Connect for TestFlight. Select App Store Connect. If you do not have yet an account linked to Apple, you can do this here.

AppCenter is connecting to App Store Connect and retrieves a list of apps. I only have one app available, making the selection easier. It also means that you have to create the app first in App Store Connect. AppCenter is not able to create the app definition for you.

Select the app and click on Assign.

In case 2FA is enabled for your Apple ID, you will have to provide an app-specific password. I wrote a blog an how to create an app specific password.

After informing the app-specific password, you get back to the previous screen. Click again on assign.

Now AppCenter is configured to connect to Apple Connect. Back at the Distribute builds section, you can select App Store Connect Users.

Result

You can now click on save or already start your first build.

Run build and distribute to App Store Connect

After the project is created and the build configured, you can start a build. AppCenter will find an available build agent, clone the repository, build, test, sign and distribute the app.

AppCenter

Waiting for a free build agent

Build starting

Distribute

After the build is done, the app is send to Apple Connect and processed there. Apple will check if the build is OK. This will take some time. The status of the build is Processing.

App Store Connect

When processing is done, you get an email form Apple.

The status of the app in AppCenter and App Store Connect changes and you can distribute the app to your beta testers via TestFlight.

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Small Wishlist for SAPPHIRE

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SAP’S prime event SAPPHIRE is happening next week. Of course SAP will talk about how great they are, how latest acquisitions add value, the new additions to the excellent portfolio, that customers are doing great thanks to SAP, and so on. It’s an event driven by marketing and sales, what else to expect?

Personally, I’d like to see some announcements that won’t happen, and won’t be announced at any other SAP event. Nevertheless, here is my personal list of things that I believe could add value to SAP’s overall ecosystem.

Trackable announcements

As with every event, there will be a lot of success stories and product launches and should padding and everybody on stage is either a friend, longtime friend, or for companies, it’s a very special relationship. And all about how great the product is. Why not make it easy to track the success? Of course S/4 is big. What about the other announcements? If it’s announced, provide a way to see how well the product is performing. Make transparent what happens to the product after SAPPHIRE is over. Bring the customer back on stage. Let them talk about the last 2, 3 or 5 years. For instance, what happened to the Leonardo solution for analyzing the health of palm trees? Is the intelligent vending machine used in the market? How is the cloud service for tax calculation performing?

Bring back apps

SAP is really good in delivering solutions for core business processes. For the additional problems, SAP tries to offer tools to customers that make it possible to create missing solutions and apps. What a customer gets is a toolset to develop, not a solution. If you want to have a mobile app for “standard” functionality today, you have to develop it. For large companies this is not a problem, for smaller one it can be, for everyone it means that they are responsible for developing apps. And to support them.

Once we had mobile workflow from Sybase / SAP, a packaged app for mobile. Afaria was a leader in MDM. Both were sold together and client got for one price a complete mobile solution. Today you can automatically create an offline enabled app using for instance mobile cards or the new mobile development kit. Using these, you develop following standard guidelines. Every partner or freelancer can offer the very same app for a customer.

The available toolset is good enough to create apps out of Fiori apps, Mobile Cards or Mobile Development Kit. Many customers want the apps you can develop with these but do not like the idea of doing this. And having to deal with all the licensing and support issues. Make it easy to offer the developed app as an app with all licensing included. SAP could provide the standard documentation on how to create an app for a given process using the toolset from SAP, and let partners either create apps following 100% these guidelines or let them add additional features. In both cases, customer can buy what is needed, with full support from partner and SAP, and without having to license all components involved. In case customer wants to change the partner, the app is build using standard recommendation, another partner can offer the exact same app.

Redefine SAP portfolio

Trusting partners to deliver the kind of apps as they were delivered by SAP means to rethink SAP Consulting positioning and its portfolio. Once SAP Consulting was a powerful organization with competent people helping customers. From technical side, the good consultants largely left. From a functional point, situation is much better. Would be nice to see SAP consulting focusing solely where it can still offer value to customers: functional consulting. Let SAP’s own consultants advice customers on how to improve their business processes. How to do accounting using S/4, Retail or supplier management. Let everything that even slightly touches technical area complete handled by either a partner or freelancer consultant. Same for support. It’s time to stop letting SAP support people act as consultants.

Simplify Cloud

When SAP executives look at it, it must be a dream for them: customers buying HEC, cloud numbers go up, only good feedback. What enters the system and bubbles up is filtered. The lower you go at a HEC project, talking to people actually working on a daily basis with HEC, situation changes: System not correctly configured, unavailability, bad support, and so on.

Personally I had so far: HANA system that wasn’t updated for years, Gateway system with language pack not correctly installed, systems unavailable because support restarted it in PRD without informing anyone, missing components like Web Dispatcher. My personal favorite: 24/7 support from Monday to Friday during Indian business hours.

It’s time to announce when SAP is either closing HEC or restarting it’s offering. Same for SCP. Neo, Cloud Foundry, it’s nice to have choice, but please close one. Announce if Neo is going to survive or not, and give a final date. Also, separate SCP services by user groups: developers & business. Business side is interested in solutions not developer services. Give each group one view at SCP and services. A possible end of this could be to close the developer part of SCP. Bring the tools to multi cloud, aka: offer them on AWS, Azure, etc.

Fiori

SAP pushed Design Thinking and provides helpful tools and guidance on how to enable it. Many customers started to use DT thanks to SAP. The initiative slowed down. Development on Build and web site seems to be at minimum effort. I would like to see SAP investing more into BUILD. Make all UI5 controls available, integrate Bootstrap controls, include controls for iOS, Android and material design. Make it a design tool not only for SAP content, but for everything. Make it the design and mock tool at companies. To speed adoption of UI5 outside SAP context, make all UI controls part of OpenUI5. Include better support for non-OData backends.

None of this will be announced at SAPPHIRE. I just wrote this down to be able to look back in a few years to see if some ideas were good. There are additional ideas that are more suitable for TechEd, like: make S/4 architecture ready for Kubernetes. Having a work process running as pod in K8S makes it easier to scale an SAP System. Allowing arbitrary databases as backend for SAP CAPM. Add SAP technologies to Swagger (OpenAPI). Deliver software via Git. Long time topic from me, think I mentioned this around 2011 in SCN. For instance, instead of installing Fiori Apps the traditional way, let me select the app in Git and import only this app and run also the included tests. Reduce drastically RAM footprint of HANA. And many more. Maybe I will write a similar blog for next SAP TechEd.

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Ideen für 2019

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2019 ist schon ein paar Tage alt, Zeit die Ideen zu sammeln und einen Plan für 2019 und 2020 zu Erstellen. Seit meiner Rückkehr nach Deutschland habe ich die Idee den SAP Community Erfolg aus Brasilien in Karlsruhe und Umgebung zu wiederholen.

Rückblick

In Brasilien habe ich maßgeblich dazu beigetragen das die SAP Inside Tracks von einem Event von wenigen Nerds zu einem Erfolg wurde. Der Prozess lief leider nicht ganz reibungslos, da man hierbei festgezurrte Denkmuster durchbrechen muss, und nicht jeder mag Veränderungen. Davon profitieren ja, aber aktiv mitgestalten? Was zählt ist aber auch das Resultat. Von einem SIT in Sao Paulo mit etwas 20 Leuten hin zu einer ganzen Menge an SITs in verschiedenen Städten mit um die 100 Teilnehmern pro Event. Ganz neue Themen wurden erschlossen, neue Leute kamen hinzu, neue Freundschaften geschlossen.

In Rio habe ich mich gegen das SIT Konzept entschieden und Meetups organisiert. Der Vorteil ist das diese keine ganztägige Veranstaltung sind wo man möglichst viel Themenkomplexe abdecken will. Während SIT schon das “Schimpfwort” SAP enthält, ist ein Meetup ein etablierter Begriff, in und außerhalb der IT. Das hilft wirklich wenn man erklären muss was man vorhat und was einen erwartet.

Was war der Unterschied? Mehrmals im Jahr eine Veranstaltung mit etwa 3 Stunden Vorträge auf 2 bis 4 Stunden verteilt und ein klarer Fokus auf ein Thema. Vor allem die Möglichkeit sich auf ein Thema zu fokussieren kam sehr gut an. Es gibt keine Unterbrechung in der Agenda, kein Vortrag morgens und erst wieder abends zu ABAP. Die Gruppe ist dadurch auch homogener, was gut und schlecht ist, aber: unter Gleichen findet man einfacher Anschluß und kann die Probleme besser besprechen. Die Fortführung der Meetups ist auch einfacher. Auch heute noch finden meine Meetups SAP Rio de Janeiro erfolgreich statt, ohne das ich noch komplett involviert bin. Es gab Veranstaltungen zu ABAP, Fiori, Cloud, S/4, etc. 2015 fand der erste Meetup statt, bis heute haben weit über 600 Leute teilgenommen. Weit über 1.000 Leute haben sich registriert. Für SAP Themen ist es die größte Veranstaltung im Bundestaat Rio, wenn nicht sogar für alle Bundesländer mit Ausnahme Sao Paulo (hier findet das SAP Forum von der SAP statt)., oder sogar für ganz Südamerika.

Die Idee

Und für 2019 und die Region Nord-Baden / Karlsruhe? Es gibt auf jeden Fall keinen Bedarf für einen SAP Inside Track. Dazu finde ich das Konzept einer großen Veranstaltung mit Vorträgen aus dem ganzen Land + Nachbarländer nicht mehr zeitgemäß. Dafür sind die Themen aus der SAP Welt zu komplex und zu schnelllebig. SAP stellt neue Funktionen alle 2 Wochen in der SAP Cloud bereit, darüber mit 1 – 2 Jahren Verspätung zu berichten ist einfach zu spät.

Der Plan

Etablieren einer Vortragsreihe im Meetup Format. Motto: think global, act local.

  • Anzahl: 2 bis 4 mal im Jahr.
  • Dauer: 2 bis 4 Stunden
  • Tag: unter der Woche, zwischen Dienstag, Mittwoch oder Donnerstag
  • 3 bis 4 Vortragende
  • etwa 30 Minuten pro Vortrag
  • Rahmen: Keynote, Vorträge, Wrap-up
  • Fokus auf 1 Thema (Cloud, C4C, Analytics, Mobile, Fiori, Personas, Design Thinking, etc.)
  • Offen für alle: SAP oder nicht SAP, Student, Anfänger, Berufserfahren, CTO
  • Kostenlos
  • So viel hands-on wie möglich, so viel Theorie wie nötig

Was wird benötigt

  • Motivierte Leute. Ob einfach hingehen um zu lernen oder einen Vortrag zu halten. Vor 20 Leuten einen Vortrag zu halten motiviert mehr als vor 20 leeren Stühlen.
  • Räume. Irgendwo muss die Veranstaltung ja stattfinden.
  • Mehr Leute. So etwas steht und fällt mit den Menschen.

Den Anfang habe ich mal gemacht und versuche interessierte Leute im Raum KA zu finden. Der Stammtisch SAP Karlsruhe existiert, einfach vorbeikommen. Auch auf Twitter (@tobiashofmann) kann man mit mir Kontakt aufnehmen. Oder über LinkedIn, Xing, E-Mail, etc.

Der nächste Stammtisch SAP Karlsruhe findet am 30.1. statt. Mehr infos hier.

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State of the art documentation from SAP

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SAP is investing heavily in marketing the Fiori for iOS and the SDK. In case you are slightly interested in Fiori and UX in general in SAP, for sure you heard a lot about the SDK. 2 ½ years after the announcement the Fiori Design guidelines include an iOS section, there are SAP Developers tutorials, a special iPad app for learning its usage is available, even Apple has set up a Fiori page. Current version of the SDK is 3.0, and now there is even an Android version available (with much less marketing activities).

If you want to write an app with the SDK, make sure you have an iPad. The online SDK documentation is available too, but offers less benefit than the Fiori Mentor app. In case you are wondering why the SDK documentation is not good enough: I suggest you take a look at it. For instance, the documentation for the map component.

As you can see, you see … not much.

No images, therefore: good luck in finding out what the UI control should look like. A look at the page source code reveals that the images are only visible to SAP employees with access to SAP’s intranet.

Server github.wdf.sap.corp is not accessible from the internet. In case you are wondering how to find the SDK documentation: SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS Assistant contains a link in its help to the API. And of course: Google. So yes, made available to the interested developer. No S-, I- or D-User required.

In case you are one of the few that develop apps using Fiori for iOS SDK, ask your manager to get an iPad. The public available SDK documentation is already not easily consumable (use the Fiori Mentor app), does not include complete sample code and comes with missing images.

SAP is now pushing the intelligent enterprise. Let’s hope that it will be intelligent enough to test if the public available documentation is complete.

 

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Activate Clickjacking-Framing-Protection service

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SAP NetWeaver comes with its own solution to prevent clickjacking for its most relevant UI frameworks. For more information about this protection, see the corresponding SAP Notes.

By default, clickjacking protection is disabled. To activate it, you need to insert a value into table HTTP_WHITELIST.

Insert values into table HTTP_WHITELIST

Transaction: SE16

Check if clickjacking protection service is enabled or disabled. It is disabled, if no record with ENTRY_TYPE=30 is in the table, or if the table is empty.

Table name: HTTP_WHITELIST

Execute

Result

By default, no values are in the table and the service is not enabled. For data that needs to be inserted into table HTTP_WHITELIST, see SAP Note 2142551. Creating an entry type with vale 30 activates the whitelist.

Transaction: SE16

Select F5 or click on the new entry icon.

Insert data. See links below for additional information on possible values.

Click save to persist the entry in the table.

Afterwards, the table will contain one record. As the record has value 30 for column ENTRY_TYPE, the clickjacking protection service is enabled.

Activate ICF whitelist service

Adding a record activates the service, but to make apps working, additional configuration steps must be taken. For instance, accessing now a WDA app (e.g. SAML2) will resolve in a HTTP 500 internal server error. This is caused by having the clickjacking protection activated, but not the whitelist service.

To solve the HTTP 500 error, you need to activate the ICF whitelist service.

Transaction SICF_INST
Technical name: UICS_BASIC

Execute. This will activate the ICF node

/sap/public/bc/uics/whitelist

Result

After enabling the service and the ICF node, the above WDA app will open in the browser.

https://vhcalnplci:44300/sap/bc/webdynpro/sap/saml2

Additional information on setting whitelist entries.

 

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