In My First Blog I had written in detail on developing Cross Platform Mobile application using Xamarin
http://scn.sap.com/community/interoperability-microsoft-net/blog/2014/01/17/sap-and-xamarin-for-c-mo...
. After that Xamarin Came up with a new Version that provides new feature called Xamarin Forms and additional support IPhone with Visual Studio
http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/mobility-platform/blog/2014/05/30/c-ios-using-storyboa....
I wanted to develop a complete SAP Purchasing Business Process with Xamarin Forms. Before that I want to highlight some points
Current preferred Solution for Mobile Development for SAP has been SUP(now SMP), in addition use SAP Netweaver GateWay. I have been consulting for a number of years and not all client are large SAP clients - Some Client have 50 to 100 users. For Such SAP Client it will not be practical to recommend
SMP or SAP Netweaver GateWay. These Clients want only some functionality of their process to be on the mobile app. The Solution proposed in my earlier blogs using Xamarin don't need any additional servers.. The Only requirement is that we should be able to use REST service and a node in SICF should be enabled.
The other is the use of SAP UI5(with Eclipse). This needs newer Version of SAP and many client I have worked have no immediate plans to upgrade. Even if they have higher version I found that SAP UI5 and HTML5 apps are much slower when compared to Xamarin as it generates native code. The speed is great.
In Fact as part of my training in HANA and HANA cloud (open.sap.com) I have worked with SAP UI5 with HANA what I found that speed is still not great when compared to Native code app generated by Xamarin.
To try out Xamarin Forms I wanted to develop a Purchasing Business Functionality and also that my app should run on all 3 Platforms (IOS,Andorid and WP) without any code changes.
The Functionality I have developed is as follows
Login -> List of Company Codes ->List of Vendors -> List of PO for Selected Vendor-> When PO is selected - A Master Detail Page is displayed(Silder Menu Page) with options for different Transactions in Purchasing and the detail page list the Purchase order lines - If you Click on PO Line - PO line details are displayed. The Images below show this
PS: Nov 11, 2014
If you want to try out the app on Android from Google Play -on your device - Search Term "Ramesh Vodela" - you have two SAP apps that you can try out
1) Procure to Pay As described here
2) Order to Cash as described in a different blog
Configuraiton allows the user to set SAP Server. SAP user, SAP Password for the REST Service Call. A list of allowed users Is stored in Ztable with password and is validated on Login after which list of comp codes is displayed
Choose IDES Company 3000
Choose Vendor 3020
choose PO 4500017460
On this screen you can double click to display line Details or slide for Menu options
The First option allows the user to Create PO, the Second GR(101),the Third MIRO(using PO,GR document) and other two give information about Stock and Vendor Balances and Open FI Documents as shown bleow
In similar way I have all the Functionality working. What I found most striking is that not one line of code was written for individual platform - all the code is one Project and Each of Individual sub device specific project has almost no code change( expect in the main file). Xamarin Forms is a few months old and Xamarin will add new features, even in the present form it makes mobile development easy and the important thing is generated Native code which runs extremely fast. I have tested in IOS emulator and Android(Samsung s3 and emulator) and some parts in WP. I plan to upload demo version so that users can download and Test for themselves(Android Version to start with). I will update the blog with the download information.
Barcoding for Material No has been added to the application using Xamarin Component ZXING
PS - Nov 11 2014 - If you want try out SAP Based mobile apps based on the above methodology - For Android device go to google play and use the Search Term "Ramesh Vodela" - there are two SAP apps one is Procure to Pay as described above and the other is Order to Cash as described in a different blog
PS Nov 15 2014 - You can try out for Iphones by downloading from App Stores - Search Term Ramesh Vodela.
- SAP Managed Tags:
