SAP Portal 7.3 Part I - How to Kickstart Developing a Customized Portal Application

Planning to develop a SAP Enterprise Portal application with version 7.3 SP3 and above? wondering how and where to start? continue read on..

You may be wondering why this article, since there are tutorials already available in SAP SDN community about developing a portal application. I tell you, if you are coming from portal application development background with other platforms such as WebSphere, Web logic, SharePoint etc., There is good chance that you will be confused with how and where to start. SAP have made simple things complex and introduced several jargon's and keywords. You may find number of several tutorials discussing about it, but you need to know how to connect all of them together to write your first hello world application. So I made it here.

Requirements.

1. SAP Net Weaver Developer Studio (NWDS) 7.3 SP7
2. SAP Enterprise Portal 7.3 SP3 and above.
3. JDK 1.6 or above
4. You have a good Java/JavaScript development background
5. 1 GB RAM  (If you are planning to install SAP EP server on you desktop, then you would require 4 GB RAM)
6. You need SAP SDM administrator username/password (this will be the OS username/password used for installation)
7. You need SAP EP Portal administrator, username and password.
8. Optinoal portal development experience with any of java portal server or sharepoint

PLUS 

1. An intelligent search engine for SAP SDN - Google may not be sufficient :) 
2. Firefox 16.0.1 (wondering why firefox, I tell you later - watch my blogs )

Those who are not having a background about Portal applications  please read about general portal concepts such as Portal Page, Portlets, Personalization, Customization and Content Aggregation. You can find number of articles in Google to start with.

SAP Portal Basic technical concepts

The below topics are the basics about SAP EP you must know before starting to write your hello world application. 

iView

Basic component that is used to construct a portal page. This is same as a Portlet or a WebPart. There are two different ways to create an iView, one being SAP proprietary portal application object and another the java standard JSR 168 or 286 portlets.

Page Layouts

Defines the structure of the page (rows and colums) where you are going to place your iViews.

Framework Page

The component that aggregates iViews and display them on a selected layout.  The common framework pages provided by SAP are class framework page and AJAX framework page.  SAP recommends to use AJAX framework pages for custom development and we will be concentrating on this.

Theme

The style sheet used by SAP to define look and feel of the portal.  This may be useful for changing the default look and feel of SAP out of the box iViews.

Desktops

Desktops consists of a framework page and theme, and this will be assinged to users based on certain rules. We will explore this later.

Master Rule Collection

Set of rules that determines what desktop should be assigned to a user.

Worksets

The collection of pages that constitues a portal application. The worksets are then assigned to a role for granting privilegs.

Roles

Portal worksets and pages are assigned to user based on their roles.

PCD (Portal Content Directory)

Online administration tool for managing iViews, Pages and other resources. This is organized similar to an operating system folders and files.

PAR

Portal Archives (applicable to earlier version of SAP EP. From 7.3 onwards, it is called SAP NetWeaver EAR)

EAR/WAR

Same as JEE EAR/WAR file, with extra configuration for SAP JVM deployment.

HTMLB (HTML for Business)

Set of tag libraries used to construct iView content.

IRJ 

Internet Runtime for Java (SAP Portal context root is irj)

Tray 

The skin or wrapper inside where the iView content will be displayed. Kind of border to the iView. Tray usually contains the iView title and the icons to minimize,maximize and customize it.

High Level Steps

Below are the high level summary of the activities you need to perform to complete development of a portal application in SAP EP.  We will explore each of them in coming sections.

1. Create iViews
2. Create an AJAX Framework page (customize look and feel of your portal) - Alternatively you can create a layout as well. we will discuss thi later
3. Deploy your iView application and Framework page to server
4. Create iViews from your portal components
5. Create iView from your framework page
6. Create a framework page from existing "Ajax Framework Page"
7. Add framework page iView (create in step 5 above) to the page
8. Add AFP Resources to the above page
9. Create Worksets
10. Create roles and assign worksets
11. Create a theme for your portal
12. Create a Portal Desktop  
13. Modify the Master Rule collection to assign the new portal desktop to user
14. Create a user and assign the roles to the user.

Continue to Part II for preparing NWDS for start development.

njoy 

Sajith

Note

You can develop a portal application with .Net also, there are free tool kit available from SAP that can be integrated with MS.Net studio for development and SAP EP Server provides a .Net engine for running such portlets.