URL of the Open Source project : http://code.google.com/p/sapmp3/
System Requirements: ABAP engine of SAP NetWeaver 7.0
SAP MP3 Logo
Introduction
Wouldn't you like to download the Product Catalog from your SAP system and show it to customers just touching photos on your preferred MP3 player?
I added the capability to export any data as MP3 files to ABAP but I leave to your immagination the design real applications (I already did some).
To explain better what I mean, I prepared an example based on the FLIGHTS application which is also used in SAP’s ABAP training courses.
Running an ABAP that uses SAP MP3, it's easy to transform flights (SPFLI records) into an MP3 library:
Launching your media player application it's now a pleasure to analyze SPFLI records, isnt't it?
It's also so funny to browse the attached images:
But let's figure out how to plan a flight after iPod synchronization. Let's start:
"touch the iPod, select the closest Airport (Artist), then the destination (Album) and finally choose one of the listed flight according to its start time (Title) and plane type (looking the image)".
Description
Technically speaking SAP MP3 is an open source ABAP MP3 Processing Class to handle metadata (ID3 tags) and images. Thus it is a generator of well classified MP3 files and it makes easy to set Genre, Artist, Album, Title, and Composer and also to add images (e.g. the cover).
Are you thinking about how it can be useful in the SAP world?
Genre, Artist, Album, Title may be filled, for example, with attributes from Materials, Employees, Customers and so on.
The idea
But SAP MP3 may be more than an ABAP Class; I hope it will be seen first of all as an idea.
Probably it's the first time that business data (e.g. Products, Employees) are seen as songs and new interesting scenarios can be developed.
As a fun of Elegant User Interfaces and an SAP NetWeaver senior consultant of Techedge I always look to digital media player applications with admiration and even inspiration. My preferred one is iTunes but also the User Interface of others (e.g. Windows Media Player) is year's ahead the UI of our business applications.
The idea is to use them to present business data both on PC and on MP3 portable media players.
Even the nice User Interface of SAP Elegant Finder was born - it is the Open Source that makes a pleasure to search on Web Dynpro fo... cannot compete with them.
In add, ABAP is already able to export data to a lot of different formats: txt, csv, html, xml, mhtml, xls, rtf but until now the MP3, the most download one, was missing.
Technical Background
Before you'll look for MP3 and ID3 in Wikipedia, let me introduce the basic concepts via the picture available in http://www.id3.org/ID3v2Easy
Each MP3 is a self explanatory file, it doesn't matter the filename ot the directory where it is located. Everything is within the ID3v2 tag. You can find more info in the web site http://www.id3.org/ (complete specification at http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0 ).
SAP MP3 is able to update the ID3v2 frames and to attach an empty audio at the end.
Remember that the maximum size of embedded images is 300x300 pixels.
Installing
Thanks to SAPlink, the installation is quite easy; download the Installation file (see Featured Downloads) from the project home page at http://code.google.com/p/sapmp3/ and follow the instructions in SAP MP3 Installation Guide.pdf.
Thanks
First of all I want to say thank you to Techedge that is always happy to contribute to sdn.sap.com.
Then thanks again to SAPlink guys: As I already did with SAP Elegant Finder, also SAP MP3 is based on SAPlink. SAPlink is a great utility that allows easy ABAP sharing between community members.
Thank you also to the authors of the great book "Next Generation ABAP Development" (Rich Heilman and Thomas Jung) from which I picked up some pieces of code to upload and download data (zip files) via SAPgui.
Other Links
ABAP is being enhanced by the community, here are some recent blogs:
- ABAP Bitmap Image Processing Class
- The specified item was not found.
- The specified item was not found.
Closing
The main contents of an MP3 file is typically binary data (compressed song) and the format is not so trivial to be managed. I hope in a lot of cooperation from the community. In my previous experience SAP Elegant Finder, the community was a little bit lazy or at least not yet deeply involved with ABAP Web Dynpro but now SAP MP3 is a pure ABAP OO project, no Web Dynpro, no Web. To become an active member of the SAP MP3 project, simple write an e-mail to me.
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