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SAP HCP openSAP course guide week 1

October 28, 2013 | 326 Views |
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[Update: This course is being repeated with updates]

Hi everyone, please be informed that the course “Introduction to SAP HANA Cloud Platform” was updated with new functionalities of the platform. Some of the units from the first course in 2013 no longer work seamlessly. To avoid issues on your side, please look into the repetition of the course “Introduction to SAP HANA Cloud Platform”. There is also a course guide available with the links to all blog posts I wrote for the updated course.

Course Guide Week 1 – Basics

Hi everyone,

the first week of the openSAP course Introduction to SAP HANA Cloud Platform will provide you with some basics around the platform.

We’ll look into cloud services in general and into SAP HANA Cloud Platform specifically including the development environment and its’ setup.

At the end of this week you’ll have your first application deployed in the cloud and on your local environment.

This document is a detailed blog post around all the units of week 1. The parent document of this blog post provides you with an overview about all blog posts I’ll write throughout the weeks of the course.

Table of Contents

Unit 1 – Basics

Introductory video

Definition of Cloud Services

You can find more detailed explanations around the definition of Cloud Services on various places.

The one I really like is on Wikipedia, that you can find under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_services#Services

The  SAP Data Center

You can get detailed information about the SAP Data Center on the SAP Data Center home page.

Integration With Other Systems

SuccessFactors Integration

Unit 2 – Your Account

The Most Important Links

Getting An Account

Find a more detailed explanation on the official documentation.

Pricing For Various Packages

Get a detailed drill-down of the prices and the various resources you can purchase for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform here.

Different Design on Account Cockpit

You’ll find a difference in the look-and-feel of your account cockpit compared to the one you see in the videos.

This is due to a change in the colors of the user interface. There are also additional tabs due to an update of the platform with additional functionality.

In the new design the “Applications” have been renamed to “Java Applications“.

You also have a new tab called “HANA Packages” for the HANA XS applications that you can also deploy on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

For the oAuth support there is also an additional tab called “oAuth“.

Former design:

Screen Shot 2013-10-28 at 10.41.18 AM.png

New design:

Screen Shot 2013-10-28 at 10.44.04 AM.png

Unit 3 – Setting Up The IDE

System Requirements

Read the list of product restrictions to get to know how you can use the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

Setting up JAVA

You need Java 6 or Java 7 installed on your machine. You need also to make sure that the java path is set in the “PATH” environment variable and also as “JAVA_HOME” – Get more details.

Open a command window in the <HCP_SDK_PATH>\tools folder. Execute “java -version” to check what is the version of your java and verify that it is the one you expect. <HCP_SDK_PATH> is the path in the file system where you unzipped the HANA Cloud Platform SDK.

You can check if the JAVA_HOME is correctly set by executing the “set” or “env” command – both commands are listing all the environment variables you have.

Port Number Of Local SAP HANA Cloud Platform Server

When adding a server of type “SAP HANA Cloud local runtime” it can happen that you’ll be assigned another port than 8080 to that server. This is the case whenever that port is already used by an application running on your machine.

For the course this is no issue at all. Simply use that port instead of the standard port 8080. If you forgot the port number of your local SAP HANA Cloud Platform runtime just double-click on the server entry in Eclipse and you’ll see the port inside the newly opened window in Eclipse (see screenshot below):

Screen Shot 2013-10-28 at 2.19.28 PM.png

On Windows you can find out which applications are running on which ports with the following commands in your command line:

netstat -a -b -p TCP

There should be a line like

TCP    0.0.0.0:8080

or

TCP 127.0.0.1:8080

In the next line the file name of the program is given.

Using other JRE than JRE 6

Nearly all of the sample projects use JRE 6. In case you have another JRE installed on your machine you can either install JRE 6 on your machine and point Eclipse to that installation (Eclipse Preferences>Java>JRE).

Alternatively you change the project properties of each sample project by right-clicking the project and clicking on Properties > Java Build Path > Libraries. After that double click the JRE System Library entry and select the other (Alternate) JRE you are using:

Screen Shot 2013-10-29 at 9.45.00 AM.png


Using the SAP JVM

For those of you installing the sap jvm don’t forget to add this setting to the eclipse.ini after the -vmargs option:

-XX:MaxPermSize=256m

Without this you will experience weird things with eclipse hanging all the time.

Get more details about this at https://help.hana.ondemand.com/help/frameset.htm?76137f42711e1014839a8273b0e91070.html.

Running SAP HCP Tools in Eclipse on Windows 8

After installing SAP HANA Cloud Platform Tools and restarting Eclipse, there is no “SAP > SAP HANA Cloud” node in the “New Server Runtime Environment”. My colleague Vladimir Pavlov provided a blog post with a workaround for this issue.

The Most Important Links

Unit 4 –  The Development Environment

The Most Important Links

Introduction to Eclipse

In case you have no experience at all with Eclipse I can recommend the free video course Eclipse and Java for Total Beginners. The course assumes you have no experience with Eclipse or Java and brings you up-to-speed in 16 lessons.

Unit 5 – Deploying The First Application

7

Common Issues

When deploying your first application to the cloud you might run into some  issues.

Using Wrong Connection Details / Authentication Issues

The most prominent one is the usage of wrong connection details.

Ensure you are using the correct host for your trial account. This is hanatrial.ondemand.com and NOT hana.ondemand.com

Also be sure to use the correct account name and user.

The account name is something like Pxxxxxxxxxxtrial and the user name is Pxxxxxxxxxx.

You can get your account name at your account cockpit. It’s at the top left corner under the text “Account”.

In such cases you should follow the following steps:

  1. connect to your HANA Cloud account cockpit (https://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com/cockpit) with your credentials
  2. Can you connect to that? If yes, move on with step 3. If no, please check your credentials again and go to step 1
  3. Check the account name that is displayed on the top left under “Focus Object”, “Account”. This should be something like xxxxxxxtrial where xxxxxxx is your username
  4. Now switch to Eclipse and follow the instructions from 05:42min to 07:04min. Check your proxy settings in case you are working behind a proxy! Ensure you are using the account name and the user you saw on your cockpit. Don’t forget that the host is hanatrial.ondemand.com and NOT hana.ondemand.com
  5. Add the application to your server as shown from 08:18min to 08:37min.

If you follow those steps you should be able to deploy the app.

Forgotten Password /Authentication Issues

Sometimes users forget their password for their account or don’t know it (e.g. if they are SAP employees that get to the account cockpit with SSO).

In such cases you can follow these steps:

  1. Go to https://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com/
  2. If you don’t see the Register button please log off by clicking on the corresponding icon on the top right
  3. Click on the Register button (yes, please click on Register although you are already registered 🙂
  4. Now don’t fill out any fields besides the field for your email address
  5. Once you’ve typed-in your email-address switch to another field in the form
  6. You’ll get a little pop-up window next to your email-address where you need to click on the link “Forgot Password”
  7. Once you’ve clicked on “Forgot Password” you’ll receive an email with an activation link
  8. Copy-and-paste that link (and don’t click on it) into your browser
  9. You’ll now be able to provide a new password. That’s the password you’ll need to deploy applications to your SAP HANA Cloud Platform account

Please be aware that you can change your password only once within every 24 hours.

Could not reserve enough space for object heap

If you get this message in the Console view of your Eclipse when deploying an application to your local machine you can try the following possibilities:

  • Possibility 1: You’ve installed a 32bit Eclipse on a 64bit computer. Try using the 64bit Eclipse on your 64bit computer and check if that helps.
  • Possibility 2: You might be able to fix it by increasing the Timeout setting of the local server runtime. This issue can happen if you have a very slow computer.
    To do that you double-click on the local server in the Servers view in Eclipse. A new window for the server’s properties opens up and you select  “Timeouts” and set “Start” to 120 seconds.
    Thanks to Stuart Pratt for this hint that he added as a comment to this blog post.Screen Shot 2013-10-30 at 9.36.55 PM.png
  • Possibility 3: Following the same steps as above until you see the window in your Eclipse for the “SAP HANA Cloud local runtime”. Click on “Open launch configuration”, switch to the tab “Arguments” and under “VM Arguments” search for the text -Xmx1024m and substitute it with -Xmx512m. Save your changes (click on Apply and OK) and try again.

Less Common Issues

Error message: ‘Server SAP HANA Cloud local runtime failed to start”

‘findstr” is not recognized as an internal or external command

When switching to the Console view you  see an error message telling you that ‘findstr” is not recognized.

Screen Shot 2013-11-06 at 6.05.46 PM.png

The problem is most probably related to your system PATH variable. This means that C:\Windows\System32 is not inside you PATH. Just add it and restart Eclipse and this should work. Find some detailed descriptions how  to add something to your PATH in these instructions:

The Most Important Links

Best,

Rui

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47 Comments

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  1. Chris Paine

    I have to query the definition of HCP being a Java or HANA XS based development platform.

    I think blogs like Building Clojure Web Applications for the NetWeaver Cloud  and Riding JRuby on Rails on SAP NetWeaver Cloud: the local taste show how a JVM is bigger than just Java. Whilst it may be harder to access the HCP specific bits of code (building some wrappers is needed) it is certainly an option if needed.

    Anyway, was a good first week 🙂

    Chris

    (0) 
    2. Rui Nogueira Post author

      Hi Chris,

      yes you are right. Anything that can run inside a JVM can be deployed on SAP HANA Cloud Platform as long as you build some wrappers around it.

      Best,

      Rui

      (0) 
    1. Rui Nogueira Post author

      Hi Vladimir,

      I actually meant the “debugging in the cloud” link as it is a not very common feature we are providing with our platform. I’ve added it to the link of important links for unit 5 as I mentioned it in the recording.

      But in any case the link to the documentation for deploying applications is also important and hence I’ve added it to the blog post above.

      Thanks for the notification.

      Best,
      Rui

      (0) 
      1. Vladimir Pavlov

        Oh, I see. Haven’t watched the videos (yet 😉 ) and just didn’t thought debugging would be so important for a first hello-world app. 🙂 But you’re right – it’s important in the sense that it’s not so common feature, and user experience is also great – you can’t really recognize that your server is running maybe thousands of miles away from you!

        Cheers,

        –Vlado

        (0) 
  4. Vinita kasliwal

    Hi team in Unit 2 new design last topic as in this post I am getting this screen and having some issue on how to work thorugh the app please can some guide me ?

    (0) 
    2. Rui Nogueira Post author

      The way I see your screen is that you haven’t deployed any app to your cloud account, yet. Does this make sense to you?

      Best,

      Rui

      (0) 
      1. Vinita kasliwal

        Nope not really .. I have to go to AWS and do the registration is that  what it means .. i was a bit reluctant on the fee they would charge so didn’t do that can we still do it without having to use AWS ..?

        (0) 
          1. Vinita kasliwal

            Are you able to use it in the same way as has been instructed on the course material I also did the same thing and i dont land up on the same page as the instructor thats what my screenshot would show can you check that and confirm ?

            (0) 
        2. Rui Nogueira Post author

          There is no reason for nor mentioning of AWS to be necessary for the course “Introduction to SAP HANA Cloud Platform”.

          You develop your applications on Eclipse with the corresponding HANA Cloud tools for Eclipse and you deploy and run those applications on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform itself.

          Best,

          Rui

          (0) 
  5. Former Member

    Hi Rui,

    I’m slowly making my way through your material and I am enjoying it.  Quick question for you: I’m currently on a Windows 7 machine, running a 32 bit browser (IE 9).  As a result, I have the 32 bit Java installed (and the 32-bit Eclipse version).  Will this create some further issues for me in this course?

    (0) 
    1. Rui Nogueira Post author

      Hi Ron,

      I haven’t tested it with 32 bit machines, but I guess it shouldn’t make a difference.

      Let me know in the forum of the course if there is any issue.

      Best,

      Rui

      (0) 
  6. Former Member

    Hi Rui,

    great Week 1.

    Within the Hello-World example I receive the following issue by startung the local server. Any idea?

    Thanks,

    Joachim

    java version “1.7.0_45”

    Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_45-b18)

    Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 24.45-b08, mixed mode, sharing)


    C:\Users\d041234\Desktop\openSAP-HANA Cloud Platform\workspace\Servers\SAP HANA Cloud local runtime-config>”C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre7\bin\java”  -javaagent:”C:\Users\d041234\Desktop\openSAP-HANA Cloud Pl……………

      “file:C:/Users/d041234/Desktop/openSAP-HANA Cloud Platform/workspace/Servers/SAP HANA Cloud local runtime-config/configuration/dev.properties”

    Error occurred during initialization of VM

    Could not reserve enough space for object heap

    Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.

    Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit.

    (0) 
    1. Former Member

      Hi Rui and Joachim

      Like the course, hope I can commit to full term.

      I had similar error to Joachim and am on a 32 bit machine. Hopefully this will help, I right clicked Server in view and selected “Open” then selected “Timeouts” and set “Start” to 120 seconds. It then managed to Start the Server and Publish my Hello app. My machine is pretty slow!.

      Regards

      Stuart

      (0) 
    2. Rui Nogueira Post author

      Hi Joachim, have you tried out the 3 possibilities I’ve added to my blog above? They are based on the experience of all the participants. Let us know if it helped.

      Best,

      Rui

      (0) 
  7. Former Member

    Hi Rui,

    I’m following you on video in the course, please help me figure out this problem. Check out the discussion ‘Unable to create server in Eclipse IDE’ in SCN.

    Apology for posting it here, as I can’t share it with you (You are not my connection yet).

    — Manoj Patel

    (0) 
  8. Moya Watson

    Thanks Rui Nogueira for a great first week!  I’m taking this in tandem with Thomas Jung’s HANA course which I missed the first time around.  Since I’m a non-developer he’s of course tough to keep up with, but I’m finding your lessons incredibly clear and great to follow along with.  One thing I noticed is that he’s using the SAP HANA-specific perspective in Eclipse — I’m wondering if we’ll get to that in this course or how do you get that perspective in Eclipse?

    thanks much —

    -m

    (0) 
    1. Rui Nogueira Post author

      Hi Moya, thanks a lot for the kind words.

      In this course we’ll not do too much into the integration with HANA XS specific topics. We’ll touch it slightly in week 2 when we’ll be using the HANA modeler of the SAP HANA Studio. I was thinking of recording a separate video showing how to deploy HANA XS apps on SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Let’s see if I can get it done before TechEd Amsterdam. If yes, I’ll put it into my blog post for week 2.

      Best,
      Rui

      (0) 
  10. Former Member

    Hi Rui,

    I had an account for  class of “Introduction to SW development on HANA”.

    In this course, after I registered with another email, I cannot active my account.

    It says: Your e-mail activation link is invalid.

    When I try to create  application to my account, i825693trial, I get errors of authentication failed.

    How can I make it work?

    Thanks,

    Rukun Wei

    (0) 
    1. Former Member

      Hi Rukun,

      Can you explain what exactly are you trying to do?

      Are you trying to log on using your old account (with this you should use your old email)?

      Are you trying to activate a new one using a new email?

      Or you are trying both? Can you specify the new and the old accounts?

      Best regards,

      Nikolay

      (0) 
  11. Prashant Soni

    Hello Rui,

    Hope you are doing well.

    I have got some issues while defining new server “SAP HANA Cloud”. I have inputted all the required information such as landscape host, account name, etc. But when i click finish on last step of defining server it gives me an error as:

    error.JPG

    Since i take this course outside SAP network, i don’t think i need to define any proxy settings. Still in eclipse IDE preferences i specified proxy settings (just in case) as you showed in Unit 3. But still i get same error.

    My account id is i303477trail.

    How can i resolve it?

    Thanks,

    Prashant Soni

    (0) 
    1. Former Member

      Hi Prashant,

      you seem to have a typo – it is “hanatrial” and not “hanatrail”. If you are outside of SAP network try without proxy (set to “direct”).

      Best regards,

      Nikolay

      (0) 
  12. Former Member

    Dear Rui,

    The course is great, and I find it very useful, though sometimes it’s too detailed 😀 For example, there’re too many obvious details concerning setting up the IDE. Nevertheless, the course is very helpful for those unfamiliar with HANA and, in particular, HCP.

    Unfortunately, I found it difficult to create a server. I have authentication problem. Bad luck, but your recommendations don’t work for me. I have this error message:

    http://i42.tinypic.com/29hnd4.png. I tried to reset password for my account at ondemand.com though I have SAP ID with SSO but that did not help. I can log on with both SSO and my new password, yet I can’t create a server with this credentials. What can be wrong?

    Can that be because I registered that account back in September, and it is outdated now? What should I do in that case? I’d like to complete this course with all its exercises and examples…

    Looking forward for some help or advice.

    Regards,

    Vladimir.

    (0) 
    1. Rui Nogueira Post author

      Hi Vladimir, have you checked my blog post above under “Common issues” if they somehow help you? Have you tried connecting to hanatrial.ondemand.com as a host?

      I doubt that the issue has to do when you’ve created your account.

      If this doesn’t help, please create a post in the openSAP forum for this course so that we can look further into it. Ideally you’d posting also screenshots of how you are trying to connect to your SAP HANA Cloud Platform account.

      Best,

      Rui

      (0) 
      1. Former Member

        Hi Rui,

        Thanks for your reply. Yes, I checked your blog post. Yes, I’ve tried connecting to HANATRIAL, not to HANA. However, the error still persists.

        As for openSAP forum, I thought this topic isn’t desirable because it has been closed for comments. I mean ‘Getting authentication error when adding SAP HANA cloud server’ topic. Another issue concerning the forum is that there’s no any button to add an image to a post. Should I just use some image hostings and publish links to uploaded screenshots? If so, I will create a topic and describe everything I do. Hope, we’ll find the solution to this problem. I don’t want to miss the rest of the course because of this error 🙁 – the practical part of it, that is.

        Regards,

        Vladimir.

        (0) 
  13. Former Member

    Hi Rui,

    I can’t seem to create a new SAP HANA Cloud server.  I get authentication failed.  I tried following your steps from the blog but when I hit the registration button (to get a new password)  it just automatically logs me in since I am an SAP employee.  I tried using my SAP login but still get the error.  Any help would be appreciated.

    Lisa

    (0) 
    1. Former Member

      Hi Lisa,

      Do you login with SSO? I, too, have SAP ID, but before logging in with SSO certificate my browser asks me whether I want to use a certificate and which one. If I press ‘Cancel’ button I am able to login with name/password combination. The error still remains, though…

      Regards,

      Vladimir.

      (0) 
      1. Former Member

        I was able to access the forgotten password link by using a different browser. So I have SSO on my IE but when I used Firefox it did not have the SSO and let me access the register -> forgotten password

        (0) 
        1. Former Member

          in order to do the same in IE:

          go to InternetOptions/Security/Custom Level / Misc

          Disable “Don’t prompt for client certificate…”

          Then you ‘ll get popup before your certificate is sent and thus can choose “Cancel” and continue w/o SSO

          (0) 
  14. Former Member

    Hi everyone,

    All my installations and settings up for the course worked except one: the Console Client. When I call it via the command prompt, I see it for very few seconds and it disappears and I have not time to read the error message. What have I missed? Can someone help me please? I’m running Windows 8.1 – 64bit. Thanks a lot for your help and for this great course 🙂 .

    Bets regards

    Hammou

    (0) 
    1. Rui Nogueira Post author

      Hi, you need to open a command line window on your machine. Go to “Start” and type-in cmd. Once there switch to the path where your SDK is by typing-in cd xxxx/tools (xxx is your path). Here you can run the Console Client.

      Best,

      Rui

      (0) 
      1. Former Member

        Hi Rui,

        Thanks. I did the modifications this WE and the Console Client is working fine. I’m really enjoying the course and all this interesting topics. Great.

        Best,

        Hammou

        (0) 
  18. Former Member

    Hi Rui,

    Liked your blog covering important aspects of hana platform for beginners. I am facing a issue to add hana trial server in my eclipse. Have raised it in forum http://scn.sap.com/thread/3562978

    Can you please have a look and let me know if you can help in anyway to fix the issue?

    Thanks in advance

    Regards

    Amit Bagati

    (0) 
  19. Former Member

    Hi Rui,

    First of all thanks for the quality of the courses you are providing on HCP. I am excited to attend this week course.

    I have a question related to HCP and SF extension, and SAML. I hope you can guide me here.

    Trying to deploy the benefits extension on my  SF instance on salesdemo4 and an HCP trial account.

    Setting-up SAML SSO using instructions provided for a real productive environement, (document provided by HCP team), so I have to extrapolate parameters for demo/trial environement.

    I get to the point where it looks like SAML is not available on HCP trial accounts.

    For example parameter below in “destination” is not supported:

    Authentication=OAuth2SAMLBearerAssertion

    Are you able to confirm this?

    Thanks in advance

    M. Fadili

    (0) 

Comments are closed.