Category Archives: SAP

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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How to access UI5 model data

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Old habits are not easily dying and replaced by best practices and general recommendations. In the early days, when UI5 started to gain traction, people discovered it, tried it out, wrote apps, made them somehow work. Everybody was learning, and things we can do today were not possible or known then. Changes to the documentation, API and recommendations are simply the result of lessons learned.

As UI5 apps are based around a model, its data, representation and manipulation, a lot of questions around UI5 development are about the model: how to access data, change, update or delete it. A good thing of UI5 is that it is following semantic versioning, and code written for UI5 1.1x or 1.2x will still work with latest versions like 1.5x. It doesn’t mean that you, as a developer, should simply copy & paste example code found somewhere.

Example

After loading the model, be it JSON or OData, you may have to access a specific property in you code. What you can find in the Internet is code like:

oData

var oData = this.getView().getModel().oData;
var firstname oModel.getModel().oData[entity].firstname;
var name = oData[entity].name;

JSON

var oData = this.getView().getModel(“device”).oData;
var osname = oModel.oData.os.name;
var osname = this.getView().getModel().getData().os.name;

First line will give you the model data object, 2nd and 3rd line the property osname of the model. The 3rd line is partly correct, as the access to the data is done through a method, but access to property name is done directly. You can work with the data object now directly, but you shouldn’t. What you want is not to work with the raw data that defines your model, but with properties.

Use access methods

Data binding is important when developing an UI5 app. You update properties, and you want to have the UI elements automatically be updated too. When accessing the properties directly, you have to check if the change is correctly propagated. Using access methods, UI5 will for sure take care of this. The method to access properties of your data model are getData, getProperty or getObject. Applying this to above code:

JSON

var oData = this.getView().getModel().getData();
var osname = this.getView().getModel(“device”).getProperty(“/os/name”);

OData

var entity = this.getView().getModel().getObject("/"+key);
var property = this.getView().getModel().getProperty("/"+key+"/Depth");

This is now only using the methods to access data. To alter the property, use the setProperty method.

OData

this.getView().getModel().setProperty("/"+key+"/Depth", 11.111)

JSON

this.getView().getModel("device").setProperty("/os/name", "windows")

The above examples may not be perfect. They show that UI5 offers methods to access model data. Using these methods your code will continue to work in the future and is guaranteed to work in future releases of UI5. Direct access to the model data is done at your own risk. In case you work on a UI5 app, use the access methods. If you work on an older app that uses direct access to the model, try to refactor the app. The change from oModel.oData to oModel.getData() is as simple as executing a find and replace.

 

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SAP Web IDE: Invalid backend response received by SCC

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Connectivity between SAP Cloud Platform and an on premise SAP NetWeaver system is normally achieved via SAP Cloud Connector. A nice feature depending on this is the remote connection of SAP Web IDE to an on premise ABAP system. The feature allows to easily load apps from the ABAP system and change or extend them from everywhere.

For this feature to work, some ICF services must be active on the ABAP system and remote access enabled on SCC. If not, Web IDE cannot “talk” to NW ABAP. Some possible errors and solutions regarding the setup are shown in this blog.

Scenario

A NetWeaver ABAP system with Fiori apps is available and the SAP Cloud Connector is configured to expose the system to SAP Cloud. I am using the SAP NetWeaver ABAP 7.51 Developer Edition for the scenario.

In the destination section of SCP, the SCC is shown as connected and the destination NPL is configured and working. A connection tests gives back a successful message: SCP <–> SCC <–> NW works.

Problem

A developer tries to extend a Fiori app. In Web IDE, the project wizard for an extension project is used.

After selecting the on premise system destination, an error message is displayed. The actual error message can differ. Sometimes you see an informative error message or just some red text or maybe nothing.

Error messages

In all cases, you can check the log of SCC and see a detailed information on the error.

The error message is:

Access denied to /sap/bc/adt/discovery for virtual host npl:443

Solution

The ICF service /sap/bc/adt/discovery is not accessible. This can be because the user does not have the right permissions, or the service is not active in the NW system, or SCC is not exposing the service.

Alternative A: SCC not exposing service

Adding a service in SCC will only expose the exact path, not the sub path. Either you add all paths exactly in the resource list, or change the access policy to accept sub-paths too.

Root cause: Path only, excluding sub-paths.

Solution: Change this to will allow Web IDE to access the resource.

Alternative B: ICF service not active

In the NW ABAP system, got to transaction SICF and check node /sap/bc/adt. This node must be activated. By default, this node is deactivated and must be activated by Basis.

Root cause: Service deactivated

Solution: Activate node adt. Right click and select Activate Service.

Alternative C: Missing authorization

Check with SU53 and SAP Help what is missing and assign the right permissions to your user.

Result

After applying the correct solution, the developer can use the extension project wizard in SAP Web IDE to load available applications.

 

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Download resources from SAP Cloud for your CI job

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When running a CI job you may need to use some SAP tools. For instance, the MTA builder or Neo tools. Many CI servers include integration to build tools or plugins are provided by the community or vender. Jenkins offers plugins for Maven, Ant or Node that let you easily integrate these into a CI jobs. If you have a CI job for SAP, it is your task to make the necessary tools available. There are not many plugins for SAP available for Jenkins.

Some tools you may need can be found on SAP’s tool site. For instance, the MTA builder. A simple JAR file that is available for download and needed in case you are working with MTA apps.

Before you can download the JAR file, you need to agree to the EUL.

This means that you cannot download the JAR using cli:

wget https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/additional/mta_archive_builder-1.1.0.jar

Solution

Running the above wget command will not download the tool, but a web site. Some may know that this is very close to how Oracle protected it’s Java download. And the “solution” here is the same: send the right cookie via wget.

wget --header "Cookie: eula_3_1_agreed=tools.hana.ondemand.com/developer-license-3_1.txt" https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/additional/mta_archive_builder-1.1.0.jar

Works for downloading other tools from the download page like the Neo SDK too:

wget --header "Cookie: eula_3_1_agreed=tools.hana.ondemand.com/developer-license-3_1.txt" https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/sdk/neo-javaee6-wp-sdk-2.137.0.1.zip

Let’s hope SAP provides some Jenkins plugins that take care of downloading these automatically.

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Clone a SCP git repository from command line

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I have a git repository on SCP that I want to clone using git on my laptop. I thought this should be easy to do. The source code of my project is available in the git repo at SCP. Cloning the repo using git clone from this URL should work.

git clone https://git.hanatrial.ondemand.com/p539123trial/cisample

The clone fails with “service not enabled.” Looking at SAP’s documentation, this should not have happened. Here SAP Cloud Platform documentation for the git service differs from reality.

SAP Help

I did a), and b) did not apply, as I wasn’t asked for my SCN user ID nor password. SAP’s git troubleshooting guide contains a section about the error message. Good to know that there is a possible solution, but I already did already what the proposed solution to the error is:

„Ensure that you have the correct repository URL. Copy it from the Source Location section of the repository’s details page in the SAP Cloud Platform cockpit.“

As it is possible to access the repository in SAP Web IDE, it should also be possible to access it from outside SCP. I know that the git repository is protected. Maybe the requests from git cli is blocked by SCP? After all, I was not asked to authenticate. Maybe I can force SCP to ask me for my password? Changing the URL to include my SCN user ID did just that: I was asked to provide my password.

git clone https://p539123@git.hanatrial.ondemand.com/p539123trial/cisample

SCP is now asking for my password and – magic happening – the git service is now accessible and the repo can be cloned. Would be nice if the git service would ask me to authenticate instead of failing directly.

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Adjust image size of Docker qcow2 file

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Short version

Increase image size by 100GB:

qemu-img resize ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/com.docker.driver.amd64-linux/Docker.qcow2 +100G

Resize partition:

qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/com.docker.driver.amd64-linux/Docker.qcow2  -m 512 -cdrom ~/Downloads/gparted-live-0.30.0-1-amd64.iso -boot d -device usb-mouse -usb

Get an empty Docker.qcow2 image from my GitHub page and make your Docker use it:

https://github.com/tobiashofmann/sap-nw-abap-docker

How to adjust the Docker image size for using large containers like SAP NetWeaver ABAP

Docker uses an image file to store Docker containers. The file is named Docker.qcow2 and is located (on Mac) at:

~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/com.docker.driver.amd64-linux/Docker.qcow2

By default, the file can grow to a size of 64 GB.

When you first start Docker, the size of this image is around 1.4GB. Adding containers, image, etc and it will grow to 64GB.

The 64GB default size can be seen when using qemu-img info:

qemu-img info ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/com.docker.driver.amd64-linux/Docker.qcow2

When this limit is reached, Docker should automatically increase the size of the image, but this isn’t working always. As a result, when the image is at 64 GB, you can get an error message stating that the device is full:

no space left on device

At least with my Dockerfile for SAP NetWeaver ABAP Developer Edition Docker is not increasing the image file dynamically. Because of this I had to split the automatic installation process in two parts: base image setup and installation. I guess that right now the SAP Installation is filling up space faster than Docker can react.

The Docker.qcow2 file is a VM disk. Therefore, it is possible to manipulate it like any other virtual disk: you can increase the disk size and access files within the VM disk when you mount the image in a VM. An easy solution to change the disk size Docker has available to store images and containers is to increase the disk size. This can be done by using Qemu and GParted.

Preparations

Locate qcow2 on your Computer

Click on open in finder. Finder opens at the specified location.

Shut down Docker.

Make a backup of the Docker.qcow2 file.

Install QEMU

To install qemu, use brew on Mac.

brew install qemu

Now Qemu should be installed.

Download GParted

Download the x64 gparted ISO image from their web site: 

https://downloads.sourceforge.net/gparted/gparted-live-0.30.0-1-amd64.iso

Resize Docker.qcow2

Resizing the Docker.qcow2 file to a new size consists of two steps.

  1. Make the disk larger
  2. Adjust the partition

Increase disk size

First, let’s make the disk larger. SAP can occupy some space, make sure you add enough GB to the image. An additional 100 GB should do it.

qemu-img resize ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/com.docker.driver.amd64-linux/Docker.qcow2 +100G

Output is a simple status message.

Image resized.

Adjust partition table

To resize the image, start Qemu, use the GParted ISO image as boot file and mount the Docker.qcow2 disk.

qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/com.docker.driver.amd64-linux/Docker.qcow2  -m 512 -cdrom ~/Downloads/gparted-live-0.30.0-1-amd64.iso -boot d -device usb-mouse -usb

I got some error messages, but Qemu started.

Starting the virtual machine will take some time. Be patient. Next you’ll have to configure the GParted ISO image.

The default values should be enough. This gives you a keyboard, mouse, English and X. After that, Gparted is started and you should see the Docker.qcow2 disk in the Gparted app.

Select the disk and click on Resize / Move. In the new size (MiB) field, enter the new size of the disk you need. The disk size is allocated dynamically and won’t occupy immediately space on your physical disk. So don’t be shy. Assign all free space to the partition.

Click on Resize/Move and on the Apply button

Last chance to stop. But as you need the new free space for Docker, click again on Apply.

The partition will be resized. In case something goes wrong, please restore the backup of the Docker.qcow2 file you made previously.

After the operation finishes, you can see that the partition is now offering 164GB.

Shutdown the VM. As the Docker.cqow2 file changed was the original one used by Docker, you have only to restart Docker to benefit from the new image size. Now you can use Docker to run SAP NetWeaver ABAP with just one command. As the Docker.qcow2 file is empty, even when the image size is reported as 4 GB, compressed (zipped) it’s just a few MB.

With the new Docker disk file you can even start SAP NetWeaver ABAP without getting the “no space left on device” message.

Image creation works. The space occupied by just the SAP NetWeaver ABAP image is already at 65 GB.

Start a container

docker run -P -h vhcalnplci --name nwabap751 -it nwabap:latest /bin/bash

In Kitematic

Start UUIDD

/usr/sbin/uuidd

Change to user npladm

su - npladm
startsap

Problem with starting SAP

When you log in to your container and run startsap, the program will fail. It will report that no instance profiles were found.

startsap

Take a look at the available profiles.

ls -1 /sapmnt/NPL/profile/

During the installation, the installation script installed the profile files for the container with the dummy name 4f65[…], after starting the container, we specified a specific host name: vhcalnplci. Of course, these do not match and make sapstart fail.

Let’s adjust the instance profile configuration.

  1. Rename files
  2. Substitute references to old hostname to correct one vhcalnplci
mv NPL_ASCS01_4f6e4ee4de40 NPL_ACS01_vhcalnplci
mv NPL_D00_4f6e4ee4de40 NPL_D00_vhcalnplci
sed -i -- 's/4f6e4ee4de40/vhcalnplci /g' *

Now run again sapstart and it should work. If not, stop and start the container and try again.

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UUIDD problem when running SAP NW ABAP inside Docker

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UUID is a good old problem when it comes to running SAP NetWeaver on Linux / SuSE. You have a problem when you log in to your SAP system and get an error message. The error message shows the root cause and solution: “The UUID daemon (uuidd) is not active (code 59999). Check SAP note 1391070.”

Solution

SAP NetWeaver isn’t meant to run in Docker. When the software was designed, Docker or event containerization wasn’t around (maybe SUN). NetWeaver assumes that it is executed inside a real Linux. And the Docker version of OpenSuSE isn’t 100% a real Linux. A lot of services you get “automatically” when installing OpenSuSE are not available. One of those is that the init.d system is not starting services. Because of this, there is no UUID daemon running.

Make sure that the UUIDD service is running. For a normal Linux distribution, I blogged about this at a previous blog of mine. In case you are using Docker with OpenSuSE, make sure that uuidd is installed and executed during the image creation:

Installation

RUN zypper --non-interactive install --replacefiles  uuidd

Execution

RUN mkdir /run/uuidd && chown uuidd /var/run/uuidd && /usr/sbin/uuidd

Result

With the UUIDD running, the logon to SAP NetWEeaver ABAP is working. No restart of NetWeaver is needed.

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Connect to NetWeaver ABAP instance running inside Docker

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This blog will help you to connect to your SAP NetWeaver ABAP instance running inside a Docker container. For how to get NetWeaver running inside a Docker container, please see my blog Docker for SAP NetWeaver ABAP 7.5x Developer Edition.

SAPGui

Open SAPGui and create a new connection.

Give a name for the connection and click on tab Advanced. I use NPL Docker. Activate expert mode and give the correct connection String. Check to which port the message server port is mapped to by Docker. Inside the container, the port is 3200, and in my case, the external port is 32771. Therefore, the connection String is:

Connection String: conn=/H/localhost/S/32771

Note: the port information is specified when you start the container. As an alternative, you can use Kitematic to see the port mapping.

Save and connect to NetWeaver.

The users and passwords can be found in the readme.html of the extracted SAP NW ABAP 751 download. Standard users are SAP* and Developer.

HTTP Access

You can test if access to your new SAP system is working via HTTP by calling the ping service: http://localhost:32769/sap/public/ping

For this to work, first activate the ping service in SICF.

When you get the response “Server reached.” you can start using the HTTP access.

SAP WebGui

For general WebGui activation, you can see my previous blog “Activation of SAP WebGui”. Here is a short version of this guide. As in the previous HTTP service access, the same procedure must be followed to have access to NPL via WebGui.

Activate the service webgui

To activate the SAP WebGui service, activate the node:

/sap/bc/gui/sap/its/webgui

Activation of public resources

You also need to activate the public service that contains the HTML files (JS, etc):

/sap/public/bc/its

Note

It is not sufficient to only activate the webgui node. The app is using additional resources that are available under /sap/public/bc/its. If this node is not activated, you’ll get an error message when logging in to webgui.

Therefore, for SAP WebGui to load the node /sap/public/bc/its must be activated too.

Activate the node its and its subnodes. Select Activate Service.

Activate with all sub nodes nodes (second Yes).

Result

After activating these two nodes, access to WebGui should work. To test this, call the URL http://localhost:32769/sap/bc/gui/sap/its/webgui After logging in, you should see the SAP Menu.

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