In this post, I’d like to present the different options for building task UIs with SAP NetWeaver BPM and help customers make the right choice for their project.
When building user interfaces for your NW BPM process, you have the choice between multiple UI technologies:
Edited by Moderator: Jocelyn Dart
Please note that as of 7.3 EHP1 SP5 Open Task UI is also available
For further information see Christian's blog
http://scn.sap.com/community/bpm/blog/2012/11/05/whats-new-in-netweaver-bpm-731-sp05
In this post, we will focus on the first three options and ignore the offline forms.
Let’s look at each technology in detail:
All three technologies will be supported by SAP until at least 2020.
For a general comparison and recommendation on Web Dynpro Java and Web Dynpro ABAP please also check this wiki page:
http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BBA/Deciding+Which+SAP+UI+Technology+to+Use
The SAP UI Development Toolkit for HTML5 – better known as SAP UI5 – is a new framework for building web-based and mobile applications, based on HTML5 and JavaScript. While released in beta only in early 2012, it has already raised some buzz in the SAP developer community.
Can you use this new technology in NW BPM? The answer is "Yes, you can".
With the BPM Java API, which is available since NW 7.3, you can access task instance data and perform task actions. For more information on how to do this, you can check out this article by Harald Schubert: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-28977.
However, using this approach currently has two caveats:
We plan to address this in one of the next versions, so that there is better support not only for SAP UI5 but also for other UI technologies like GWT or JSF.
Edited by Moderator: Jocelyn Dart
Please note that as of 7.3 EHP1 SP5 the above caveats no longer apply.
For further information see Christian's blog
http://scn.sap.com/community/bpm/blog/2012/11/05/whats-new-in-netweaver-bpm-731-sp05
The following table lists UI frameworks from SAP:
Web Dynpro Java | VC (Eclipse) | Web Dynpro ABAP | SAP UI5 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Integration in BPM since | CE 7.11 | CE 7.2 | NW 7.3 | (standalone) |
Supported data types | built-in simple types | VC types | String, boolean, INT4 | CSDL (ODATA) |
Custom Input Validation | yes | no | yes | yes |
Programming Language | Java | - | ABAP | JavaScript |
Auto-generation from BPM | yes | yes | no | no |
Integration with BPM | native | native | native | via API |
Can show task in UWL | yes | yes | yes | no |
So which technology should you choose? As always, it depends on various factors. Besides the more technical aspects listed in the table above, you should also consider
What is your opinion? Do you have experiences in using NW BPM with alternative UI technologies?
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