How to use SAPUI5 with Windows 8 and Neptune

We have seen an increase in the adoption of windows 8 for desktop in the enterprise market recently and companies are also looking at the new Surface and other Windows 8 tablets. How cool would it be to run SAPUI5 windows 8 apps on these?

Being a Microsoft partner as well as a SAP partner focusing on HTML5 we took on this challenge and are happy to announce that with the 2.12 version of Neptune Application Designer this is really very easy.

The major issue with combining WinJS and SAPUI5 is that Microsoft has made it very difficult to inject content dynamically which basically what SAPUI5 does.

Anyhow, we worked around this issue and created some global overrides to the methods that caused the issues and the apps can be exported to Windows 8 in a matter of minutes now.

You will need Visual Studio with JavaScript support for creating these applications.

First step is to create a new project in VS. Choose Blank App:

Next, save the project and exit VS

Go to the new Export to Windows 8 transaction in Neptune

Add a local directory and the app you wish to export

Copy the Default.html and the Neptune folder and add you SAPUI5 folder (This you need to get from SAP) And move it to the VS project folder (Overwrite the default.html)

Start VS and in the Solution Explorer click show all files and include the Neptune and the SAPUI5 folder to the project (right click on the folders and chose include in project)

Run the application and you see that you now have SAPUI5 apps with access to the SAP Business Suite

To add icons/splash screens etc open the appxmanifet file and import what you need.

Since you have access to the WinJS capabilities you can play around with cool features like badges on the live tiles etc.

If you need more information we will be at TechEd Las Vegas and Amsterdam, come to our booth for a demo