SAP HANA Cloud Portal Q3+ 2014 Release Highlights

Note: SAP HANA Cloud Portal was renamed to “SAP HANA Cloud Platform, portal service” in May 2016.

Lots of exciting new features and enhancements were added to the SAP HANA Cloud Portal product during Q3 2014. In this blog I will emphasize the major topics while the full list can be viewed in the the Cloud Portal Product Documentation under Release Notes. I’ve decided to name this blog Q3+ release highlights to include few last minute items that were delivered with our latest release a week ago.

Creating Cloud Portal Widgets in SAP Web IDE

SAP HANA Cloud Portal now provides external plugins for the SAP Web IDE development environment, allowing developers to easily create OpenSocial widgets, and deploy them directly to SAP HANA Cloud. You can create different types of OpenSocial widgets by using predefined templates that represent the most common flows in Cloud Portal.

Getting Started

You can experience the new Cloud Portal plugins using your HANA Cloud Platfrom developer trial account. To get started you will have to configure first the Web IDE’s plugin settings:

1. In the Web IDE’s main menu at the top, go to Tools > External Plugins.
2. From the Plugin Repository drop down list select the SAP Plugins item.
3. Select the checkbox to enable the SAP HANA Cloud Portal external plugins.

You can now create a new project in the Web IDE based on the desired widget template. Fill in the required information in the wizard and click finish.

When done, you will be able to preview your application before it even gets to run in the portal.

Running Fiori Launchpad on HANA Cloud Platform

SAP Fiori launchpad is a role-based, personalized, real-time and contextual aggregation point for business applications and analytics. It runs on multiple devices, using the responsive design paradigm, and is deployable on multiple platforms (ABAP, Enterprise Portal and HANA Cloud Platform).

The Fiori launchpad on HANA Cloud Platform (known as FLP@HCP) can run as a complete SaaS solution or in a hybrid scenario, consuming business data from the on-premise systems and/or the cloud. It also provides the apps with services such as navigation, embedded support, and application configuration.

Customers who are running HANA Cloud Portal productively can already benefit from the Fiori Launchpad on the very same account (not available in the HCP developer trial at the moment).

Import and Duplicate Site Pages

You can now add pages to your Cloud Portal site by importing content from an existing page in the current site or another site to which you have access, or by duplicating a page within the site.

Importing pages allows you to copy text, images, and other widgets from another page into the content area of a new page, enabling you to quickly add content to your site. Regardless of whether the source page is from the current site or from another site, the page template and theme are inherited from the current site. The page access permissions are inherited from the parent level of the page hierarchy.

Changes in Page Templates Management

Today, you can already add or remove page templates for your site based on the available page templates delivered with SAP HANA Cloud Portal. You can now import a page template from the out-of-the-box templates and add it to the set of available templates. In addition, you can duplicate an available page template to use as the basis for a new template, hover over the page template card and click Duplicate page template.

Performance Best Practices

A new chapter in the Developer Guide offers best practices for improving performance while working in Cloud Portal. These practices include general measures and Cloud Portal specific measures.

For more details see: SAP HANA Cloud Portal Develop Guide

Read More

Check out the Cloud Portal Release Notes

Visit the Cloud Portal official product website

Subscribe to the SAP Portal newsletter