Introduction

SAP Gateway 2.0 SP09 has been released on July 16, 2014 together with SAPUI5 (release 1.22 which is required for Unified Inbox). In this whitepaper we want to provide an overview about the most important new features that have been delivered with SP9. In addition this page will serve as a landing page to SCN content that will be published around these new features. A complete and more detailed list of features that are new can be found in the SAP Online Help: What’s New in SAP NetWeaver Gateway 2.0 SPS 09 – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library .

Availability with SAP NetWeaver 7.40

Please note that the features shipped with SAP Gateway 2.0 SP9 are not available in SAP NetWeaver 7.40 yet.

According to SAP note http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1942072 SPS9 is equivalent to SP08 for SAP_GWFND.

1. Performance improvements

Support of HTTP header field if-modified-since

SAP Gateway now supports the HTTP header field if-modified-since. As described in the HTTP/1.1: Header Field Definitions (section 14.25) the if-modified-since HTTP header field can be used by the client to signal the server only to return data if the same has been modified since the date and time specified by the If-Modified-Since header. If the data has not been modified the server will not return any data but a HTTP 304 (not modified) response without any message-body.

For more information see:

• Last Modified and Cache Control – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library

Improved ETag Handling

ETags are used to allow for updates when using cached information. By using ETags it is possible to implement an optimistic locking where a client doesn’t really lock the data but performs a quick check before performing an update to avoid an update of the wrong version of an entity.

So far the framework of SAP Gateway supported a generic handling of ETags. For this a property of an entity type only has to be marked as an ETag. This however required always an additional roundtrip to the backend because the framework automatically performs a GET request to check whether the data has been updated meanwhile. Now the ETag handling can be performed in the backend in an optimized way in the update procedure.

For more information see:

• ETag Handling – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library

Softstate – “Stateful” behavior of OData services

Though it sounds like a contradiction to the REST principles we have added the option to achieve a “stateful” behavior of OData services published via SAP Gateway. To be exact it is not a stateful behavior in the strict sense but more a server side caching. This feature that is called Softstate has been added to SAP Gateway because it allows for a significant gain of performance for certain scenarios.

As stated in our Online documentation “by using soft state, the resources/functionality which has been loaded during the initial load can be reused for the subsequent requests of the service. Thus, the main benefit of soft state is a considerable performance optimization of an OData service”.

One of the use cases that could be addressed with this feature are shopping baskets in SRM scenarios that contains price information that requires complex calculations in the backend.

Based on the Soft State it is also possible to use the new Soft State Based Query Result Cache feature. This feature allows to cache data on the Gatway Hub so that the consumer application can use paging wihtout the requirement to read the data from the backend.

These advantages come however with a price tag since they require additional memory on the SAP Gateway server!

So you have always to make sure when using Soft State Based Query Result Cache (SQRC) that appropriate filters are used that minimize that data that is cached on the Gateway server. In case of emergency the memory consumption can be reduced by the administraor by simply deactivating the SQRC.

For more information see:

• Soft State Support for OData Services – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library
• Soft State Based Query Result Cache – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library

2. OData Service Development and Life Cycle Management

Service Extensibility

The extensibility of OData service is frequently used for SAP Fiori applications as described in SAP Note 1919388 – How to extend OData services in Service Builder. So far it was necessary to create a new service with a new URL. Here the developer creates a new project in the Service Builder where a new service is generated based on the original service by using Redefinition.

As of SP9 you can now register a new service in the backend such that it extends an existing service. As described in the SAP Online Documentation OData requests for the original, extended service will then be processed by the new, extending service. So while the endpoint (URL) remains the same the original service is replaced with another service extending it. As a result the URL that is used by the consuming (Fiori) application does not have to be changed.

For more information see:

• Maintaining Models and Services – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library
• SAP Note 1919388 – How to extend OData services in Service Builder

Improved Support for Search Helps

The support of search helps that has been introduced with SP8 has been further enhanced. In addition to the mapping proposals that eased the process of creating the mapping to the data source SEGW now also generates the appropriate coding for both read operations (GET_ENTITYSET and GET_ENTITY).

When using DDIC import to create an entity type you can now also import the associated search helps with the help of the wizard of SEGW

For more information see:

• Importing Search Help as a Data Source – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library
• Importing a DDIC Structure – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library

3. Workflow Support – Unified Inbox

The Task Gateway Service version 2 has been further enhanced in SP9 and various new collections have been added to it. In addition new functionalities have been added to the generic UI5 UI for the Task Gateway Service which is called the Unified Inbox.

You can now create substitution rules to manage your substitutes, add attachments to a task and view the details of a task and forward one or more tasks to other users for completion.

For more information see:

• Task Gateway Service Version 2 – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library
• Managing Tasks with the Unified Inbox – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library

4. Supportability

CCMS

With SP9 we added the possibility to navigate from alerts in the Gateway CCMS Monitors to the corresponding Error Log entry. This is possible since the alerts issued on the hub have a direct connection to the Error-Log entry via the transaction-id. An alert appears when the first alert is created by an agent but it is also possible to make those monitoring trees visible immediately by starting an appropriate report.

For more information see:

Alert Monitoring with CCMS – SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library

Other information

• New SAP online documentation for SP9 SAP NetWeaver Gateway – SAP Library