Environment topics in FPN – Part 1
Hi,
My name is Oren Root and I’m the project lead for FPN.
In my blog I’ll try to set up a channel between development here in the labs and the outside world.
Enough with the introductions, let’s move on to some real material. One of the things FPN does is integrate remote content seamlessly into your consumer portal.An issue that keeps poping up is the environment handling in FPN. How is the locale of the remote content determined?
Well, to answer this, lets first look at the way the locale is determined in a local portal application’s runtime.
Using the ForcedRequestLanguage property, an iView can override the settings and declare its own locale. If this is not defined then the locale is taken from UME. If no locale was personalized then the locale is taken from the browser.
The locale determined is sent to the producer when we ask to render remote content.
Ok, so we understand what locale is sent to the producer, this is good. Is this now the locale we’ll see rendered in our remote application? Not necessarily. You see, if the remote application is what we call a SAP Application, integrated using the application integrator such as BW reports, WebDynpro (Java and ABAP) the runtime rendering the content knows how to accept the locale parameter (sap-locale).
The Portal Runtime on the other hand ignores this parameter and calculates the locale according to the explanation above. This affects KM content for example.
In my next post I’ll discuss theme integration in FPN. So stay connected.
Oren
You mention that FPN uses the Consumer locale to compute the target system locale unless this is overridden. We currently use a dynamic language calculation for integration of SAP back end systems into the Portal. This calculation is done using a customer exit to the application integrator and allows us to "switch off" languages the Portal accepts but the "back ends" do not.
When moving to use FPN, we would like to be able to build a similar feature to say something like all content from producer XXX is only visible in English and Producer YYY is visible in the locale of the Consumer.
Is there a generic customer exit built into the mechanism that FPN uses to trigger this? We had discussed this with Jana Richter before and concluded it should be possible but I am now looking for documentation on how this should be done. Can you recommend any sources?
We do not want to use the forced language parameter as not all consumer languages should be forced to a generic language (for example, double byte should convert to English but single byte languages not).
Thanks a lot
Bernard
Since the redirect to the producer is done by the application integrator I have consulted with the developer of the application integrator - Udo Offermann. The same customer exit method can be used in the FPN case.
However, since in FPN the application integrator essentially always runs on the consumer, it's important to note that the customer exit has to be registered on the consumer and will be executed on the consumer.
More info on the topic can be found here:
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/com.sap.km.cm.docs/documents/a1-8-4/how%20to%20start%20transaction%20iviews%20with%20a%20dynamically%20computed%20language.pdf
Best regards,
Oren