Sapcommunity
Enabling document fragment links for headings in SAP Community blog posts
I came up with a bookmarklet to allow me to get hyperlinks for pointing to specific sections of blog posts on the SAP Community platform. I'm running the Developer Challenge this month and for that I...
Test drive Joule's generative AI features in SAP Build Code now!
TL;DR - SAP Build Code is GA, and for a limited time (1 month, starting now) you can test drive the generative AI features of Joule in SAP Build Code. Introduction This week, SAP Build Code is GA:...
SAP community memories
This year, SAP is celebrating 20 years of the web-based SAP Community platform. Happy anniversary! I thought I'd contribute to these celebrations with some memories of my own. Recently my good old...
Managing resources on SAP BTP - what tool do I choose?
There are myriad resources on the SAP Business Technology Platform, and different ways to manage them. In this post I outline a way to think about the different tools and when to use what. Update: The...
CAP is important because it's not important
In this post, I consider what CAP really is, what it gives us, and why we should consider it a fundamental piece of the puzzle in the cloud context and beyond. Update (08 Nov): This blog post is...
Monday morning thoughts: digging deeper
In this post, I think about the tools we use in our day-to-day activities, the feeling I have that I'm just scratching the surface with regards to their capabilities, and what I plan to do about it...
Set up VS Code on Chrome OS for local Application Programming Model development
In this post I walk through the process I used to set up a development environment for CAP on my Chromebook. (See the Updates section end of this post for a couple of notes on things that have changed...
Monday morning thoughts: OData
In this post, I think about OData, in particular where it came from and why it looks and acts like it does. I also consider why I think it was a good protocol for an organisation like SAP to...
Monday morning thoughts: what not how
In this post, I think about how we program, about the way we describe what it is that we want the computer to do for us, and look at what has become for me the canonical example of the difference...
Monday morning thoughts: abstraction
In this post, I think about abstraction, the power and facility it affords, and consider CDS as one example of a modern abstraction language. Last week I was chatting to some old friends. One of them...
Monday morning thoughts: milestones
In this post, I look back at changes and developments that I consider milestones in SAP's technology history, and muse on some of the developments today that we'll consider milestones in the...
Monday morning thoughts: cloud native
This weekend I discovered that one of my favourite online REPLs* - repl.it - has a new feature where you can build and publish a website on a repl.it subdomain: *REPL: Read Evaluate Print Loop - an...
Understanding SAP Fiori Webinar - The Director's Cut
Yesterday Brenton O'Callaghan and I hosted a public webinar "Understanding SAP Fiori", which was well attended and also a lot of fun to do. There was never going to be enough time to cover...
SAP Developer Advisory Board - Your Input!
Gregor Wolf and I are attending the SAP Developer Advisory Board meeting on Tue 22 Apr 2014. We'd like to ask you, as members of the general SAP Developer Community, for your thoughts. There isn't a...
Small steps - OpenUI5 toolkit now in jsbin.com
In our continued efforts to spread the word of SAPUI5 in general and OpenUI5 in particular, we try to make small steps forward. Here's some quick news about a small step forward with respect to...
Reaching Out
As a technology company SAP is over 4 decades old. Over that time it's innovated at a tremendous pace, and along the way it has abstracted, invented and reinvented technologies like no other company I...
Mocking up the Payroll Control Center Fiori App
Following on from a great debate about Fiori and Freeori that stemmed from a post by John Appleby there were some comments about HCM app renewals. Latterly John Moy pointed out a post Improve payroll...
Public SAP Mentor Monday 24 Mar 2014 - UI5 with Andreas Kunz
On Monday 24 March 2014 we will have a public SAP Mentor Monday session on the subject of UI5. UPDATE 25/03/2014: Links to the recording and items mentioned in this session are available. For those of...
XML Views and Resource Bundle Declarations
Just a quick post on the train on the way down to London this morning. The other day, Andreas Kunz pointed to an overview of the MVC options which contains very detailed information - an interesting...
UI5 XML Views - Another Example
I've been diving into UI5 XML views and sharing the love recently - see Mobile Dev Course W3U3 Rewrite - XML Views - An Intro (as part of Mobile Dev Course W3U3 Rewrite - Intro), and the XML view...
Help Us To Help You - Share Your Code
Yesterday I tweeted: "We should encourage folk to post full Gists with their ui5 issues, for easier debugging and analysis (http://scn.sap.com/message/14665116)". So I decided to put my...
Mobile Dev Course W3U3 Rewrite - XML Views - An Analysis
I rewrote the mobile dev course sample app from W3U3. Then I created a new branch 'xmlviews' in the repo on Github and rebuilt the views in XML. I then took a first look at XML views in general. Now...
Custom Sorting and Grouping
Summary: Learn how to control the order of groups in a sorted list. You don't do it directly with the grouper function, you do it with the sorter function. One of the features of the app that the...
CodeTalk - SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori
Yesterday I was honoured to be a guest on Ian Thain's CodeTalk series of video interviews. The subject was SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori, and the published interview is split over two videos on YouTube. Here's...
Mobile Dev Course W3U3 Rewrite - XML Views - An Intro
I rewrote the mobile dev course sample app from W3U3. Then I created a new branch 'xmlviews' in the repo on Github and rebuilt the views in XML (they were originally in JavaScript). This post talks...
Mobile Dev Course W3U3 Rewrite - ProductList, ProductDetail and SupplierDetail
I rewrote the mobile dev course sample app from W3U3. This post explains what I changed in the ProductList, ProductDetail and SupplierDetail views / controllers. See the links at the bottom of the...
Mobile Dev Course W3U3 Rewrite - App and Login
I rewrote the mobile dev course sample app from W3U3. This post explains what I changed in the App and Login views / controllers. See the links at the bottom of the opening post to get to explanations...
Mobile Dev Course W3U3 Rewrite - Index and Structure
I rewrote the mobile dev course sample app from W3U3. This post explains what I changed in the index.html file, and why. It also takes a look at the general app structure of directories and...
Mobile Dev Course W3U3 Rewrite - Intro
tl;dr - the Github repo "w3u3_redonebasic" is a simple re-write of one of the open.sap.com mobile course sample SAPUI5 apps to fix some fundamental issues. In the current open.sap.com course...
Building SAP Fiori-like UIs with SAPUI5
SAP TechEd 2013 is fast approaching, and the excitement is building. Interested in SAPUI5 (you're reading this blog post in the SAPUI5 Developer Center space on SCN already!), you're looking to see...
An Amazing 36 Hours at SAP Labs Israel
I'm sitting in TLV airport waiting for my flight back to MAN via FRA. I've just spent a whirlwind 36 hours, more or less, in an amazing developer engine also known as SAP Labs Israel. Before I start...
Engaging the Next Generation
As many of you might know (from my #YRS2013 tweets this month), I was involved again in Young Rewired State, an initiative that gathers kids all around the country, gives them a week-long opportunity...
Happy Birthday SCN, Old Friend
Happy Birthday, SAP Community Network, or, to give it it's original name (which gives you a clue to its origins) the SAP Developer Network - SDN. Finding myself sending birthday greetings to an...
Simple SAPUI5 Chrome icon for lazy developers like me
I created a Chrome “hosted app” manifest to get a large start page icon with which I could navigate directly to this excellent content resource. Now I can get to my favourite area on SCN in even less...
Public Github repo sapui5bin available
Recently I've found myself making references to a small but growing collection of runnable SAPUI5 snippets that I've been collecting together, called "sapui5bin". It started from early...
Jump to Shell Workset Item from URL
During SAP TechEd 2012 I attended CD163 "SAP HANA - Application Services Basics" which really helped firm up my knowledge of XS, thanks to the great presentation and exercises. What was...
OData Everywhere
We're well into Day 1 at SAP TechEd 2012 in Madrid, and while SAP NetWeaver Gateway has already been mentioned in this morning's keynote (even though the keynote was more Sapphire-focused than...
Blog It Forward - DJ Adams
Well hello there. I guess if you're reading this you know already about the great Blog It Forward initiative here on SCN. I've been nominated by the great (Austrian!) Matthias Steiner on his BIF post,...
SAPUI5 says "Hello OData" to NetWeaver Gateway
So following a very interesting podcast from Rui Nogueira with SAP's Michael Falk and Tim Back on the HTML5-based UI Toolkit for SAP NetWeaver Gateway (aka "SAPUI5") earlier this month, a...
Making OData from SAP accessible with the ICM's help
I'm totally enamoured by the power and potential of SAP's NetWeaver Gateway, and all it has to offer with its REST-informed data-centric consumption model. One of the tools I've been looking at in...
REpresentational State Transfer (REST) and SAP
REST (which stands for REpresentational State Transfer) is an architectural style that is informed to a large extent by, but theoretically not limited to, the HTTP application protocol (yes,...
Tech Skills Chat with JonERP - A Follow-on Story
Sitting in a traffic jam on the A34 this week, twice, I got the opportunity to catch up with the excellent Enterprise Geeks podcasts. In one particular TechEd Phoenix episode "Tech Skills Chat...
REST orientation - Controlling access to resources
Background Using my new REST handler / dispatcher for the ICF, I can adopt a Resource Orientated Architecture (ROA) approach to integration. This gives me huge advantages, in that I can avoid...
A new REST handler / dispatcher for the ICF
One of the best underlying mechanisms to be introduced into the Basis / NetWeaver stack in the past few years is the Internet Communication Framework (ICF), which is a collection of configuration,...
SAP and Google Wave - Conversation Augmentation
It's been pretty much six years to the day since I last wrote here about Dashboard, Nat Friedman's project and implementation of a realtime contextual information system. So I thought it fitting to...
Book review - SAP Business ONE Implementation
A short while ago I was sent a review copy of “SAP Business ONE Implementation”, by Wolfgang Niefert, published by Packt Publishing. On receipt, I skimmed through it, and my first impressions were...
One way of dealing with blogtheft from SDN - through images
I’m sure you’re all aware of the recent #blogtheft issue – where some rogue has been lifting content lock stock and barrel from here and reproducing it – sans author name – on their website...
A return to the SDN community, and a touch of Javascript
A few days ago, Mark Yolton pointed out to me that this Friday, 30th May will mark 6 years since my first SDN blog post “The SAP/MySQL Partnership“, in SDN’s first month. My oh my, how things have...
OssNoteFix script updated for Greasemonkey 0.6.4 and Firefox 1.5
Last year, I got so frustrated at the pain of using the SAP Service Marketplace, and particularly OSS notes, that I got up and did something about it – I wrote ‘OssNoteFix’, a Greasemonkey script...
SAP and Open Source - an analysis and letter to SAP and Shai
Well this has certainly been an interesting few days in the intersecting worlds of SAP and Open Source. There’s been a lot of comment and discussion already, but having listened to the whole Churchill...
The SAP developer community 10 years ago
Yesterday Alan pointed us (Whopping big collection of tips for developing workflows) to a collection of tips on developing workflows, hosted by MIT, on a mailing list called ‘SAP-WUG’. I guessed that...
Hacking the SAP service portal to make OSS notes better
Ahh, OSS notes – a topic close to my heart (see Improving the OSS note experience and FOSDEM, and small OSS Notes Browser Hack). The OSS Notes Experience The other day I decided to stop going on about...
SDN Meets Labs gets underway at SAP University
The SDN Meets Labs at Walldorf-Rot gets underway at Walldorf-Rot. I’ve written a post on my weblog that I uploaded during the Keynote by Klaus Kreplin and Ivo Totev (Ivo’s just telling us about visual...
(Mini) Installfest in the SDN clubhouse at TechEd
Piers and I got hold of the latest WAS 6.40 demo system (NW4) from the LinuxLab guys’ stand here at SAP TechEd. It contains ABAP service pack 3 and Java/J2EE service pack 7. Since I had my small...
Photos from SAP TechEd Munich
(The third weblog in two days … what’s going on? Well, Mark is a hard taskmaster, obviously 🙂) There’s a group photo pool on Flickr for SAP TechEd this year; I’ve just uploaded a load of photos (of...
The meaning of LIFETIME_RC
Last week, during some preparation for my talk at TechEd on Thursday this week, I’d been wondering about something in the ICF that hadn’t seemed quite right. Interface IF_HTTP_EXTENSION, which is what...
SAP TechEd first day - notes from Munich
Well, after a nightmare getting here (V-Bird, the airline I was booked with, went bust) I’m now in Munich at a decidedly disconnected TechEd 04 (more on the disconnected misery later). After...
SAP TechEd here I come ... with session slides!
SAP TechEd is looming large, and this year it’s in Munich. (If you’re not in Europe, then SAP are holding TechEd events in Bangalore, Tokyo, and San Diego too). I went last year (in Basel), and was...
A little taste of SAP at EuroFoo
I’m in Enschede (Netherlands) this weekend for EuroFoo – a mini-conference get-together for hackers and geeks of different persuasions. It’s a great mix of ideas, skills, and energy, where the talks...
SDN Meetup in Walldorf - a summary
Well, 24 hours (almost to the minute) have passed since I got off the train at Wiesloch-Walldorf station yesterday. I’ve just got on the train again to go home. Yesterday was quite a day. There was a...
SDN Meetup in Walldorf - pictures
I arrived in Walldorf this morning and was met and looked after very well by Mark. I’ve just taken some pictures with my trusty mobile phone and posted them on the web. There’s lots of great...
TechEd talk winners - congrats
Congratulations to the three TechEd talk winners Luke, Jayakumar and Andreas. The winning talks look really good – I’m looking forward to hearing them. It’s interesting that two of the three are BW...
Forget SOAP - build real web services with the ICF
I don’t like getting into a lather when it comes to data and function integration. Rather than using SOAP, I prefer real web services, built with HTTP. As an example of taking the RESTian approach to...
NW4, OSS1 and logon group selection for OSS
While waiting for the DD ACTIVATION phase of an add-on installation to finish, my mind wandered off to something I’d noticed with my new WAS 6.40 testdrive for Linux is here! system, with the SID...
SAP at JAX 2004
My friend Matthew Langham reports on SAP at JAX 2004 in Frankfurt (Matthew is giving a total of three sessions at JAX). It’s not that SAP hasn’t had a presence at other non-SAP events before now; it’s...
WAS 6.40 testdrive for Linux is here!
Phew. What a day yesterday at the world’s biggest IT fair. I arrived by train and joined the masses along the CeBIT skywalk to enter Aladdin's cave. I made a beeline for the main SAP area in Hall 4,...
FOSDEM, and small OSS Notes Browser Hack
Tomorrow morning I’m off to Brussels for FOSDEM – the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ Meeting. Some people might wonder what this has to do with SAP, but don’t forget that lots of people...
Evaluation WAS 6.40 on Linux - top reason for attending CeBIT 2004
Ahh, it’s always great to be able to attend the world’s biggest ICT (information and communication technology) fair – CeBIT. And of course being an SAP hacker, it goes without saying that a visit to...
Food for thought - LDBs and ABAP Objects
During part of this week I’ve been fighting with an old adversary, output determination. In the fracas, I spent some time inside RSNAST00 (the selection program for issuing output) and couldn’t help...
BSP - Mangled URL Decoder
The BSP mangles URLs. Deep down. In BSP In-Depth: URL Mangling, Brian McKellar did a splendid job of both feeding hunger for information and increasing one’s appetite. He mentioned the BSP application...
SAP TechEd - Collaborative notes
I’m off to SAP TechEd this week in Basel. Fantastic. It was a bit of a bumpy start – the online-registration process was a bit of a shambles, and I had to ring up to complete the transaction as the...
Dashboard as extension to R/3 and SAPGUI client
How do your users work with SAP data? Exclusively through SAPGUI or with other desktop apps too? If it’s the latter, read on. Dashboard is an intriguing project headed up by Nat Friedman. The concept...
Improving the OSS note experience
I remember the time when OSS was a fledgling service, and it ran on an R/2 system in Walldorf. You accessed it via the R/2 SAPGUI just as any other R/2 system. It was great, and the volume of notes...
SAP InfoTag on Web Application Server
SAP are running an Infotag on the Web Application Server in early September. It’s in Ratingen (Duesseldorf), just around the corner – literally, in fact – from where I used to hack on R/2 at...
SAP talk at OSCON, and RSS
We got a pretty good attendance at our talk on SAP R/3 at OSCON this year. We had people who were using R/3 in a corporate environment already, and people who were just curious about the famous ERP...
SAP and Open Source BOF at OSCON
If you’re at OSCON or around the Portland area this Wednesday (9th July), come along to the SAP and Open Source BOF to chat with SAP and Open Source hackers about where the crossovers between the two...
SAP stuff at OSCON
My partner-in-(code)-crime Piers Harding and I are speaking at this year’s OSCON (Open Source Convention). What can the desperate open source hacker do in and around R/3? Plenty! If you’re going to...
The SAP/MySQL Partnership
I keep hearing reports that the recent announcement of cooperation between SAP AG and MySQL AB has been making the community unhappy. What’s the deal? I don’t understand what’s not to like here. SAP...