FIORI Launchpad in SAP HCP - news tiles and cross origin policy error

[rurban]

Dear reader,

I would to share my experience related to the use of FIORI Launchpad (FLP) on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

The requirement was to publish a launchpad site in order to present to the users some application tiles and some news tiles. So I customized the FLP in order to create a news tile which point to rss feed http://www.ft.com/rss/companies (Financial Times Companies news).

As soon as the configuration was completed, I refreshed my launchpad a no news was shown. So I checked my bowser console and I found the error message:

Mixed Content: The page at 'https://flpnwc-<account_id>.dispatcher.hana.ondemand.com/sap/hana/uis/clients/…ells/fiori/FioriLaunchpad.html?siteId=<siteid>' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure XMLHttpRequest endpoint 'http://www.ft.com/rss/companies'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.

So I googled a bit and I found a lot of info related to this issue and how to solve it, but on an ABAP environment. Among those search results I found the video Fiori News Tile Setup & Cross Domain Origin Policy - YouTube and afterwards the note 1968559 - Set up News Tile for usage in Fiori Launchpad.

The guy in the video give me the idea to implement something similar  on HCP (he implemented an ABAP class that acts as a proxy), using the JAVA nature of this platform.

So I found an example of a servlet class which acts as a proxy (I got the starting code from here) and I created a JAVA application using that class.

I change a bit the code adding the doGet method and the haeder value Access-Control-Allow-Origin = * like

res.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");

I deployed it on my HCP and I set the feed's URL of the news tile like:

https://esaasfeedreader<account_id>.hana.ondemand.com/ESaasFeedReader/HTTPProxy?url=http://www.ft.com/rss/companies

In this way the news tile gets the feed content via my java servlet proxy and shows it in FLP

Attached you can find the complete code of the class I used.

Check this doc on how to start develop JAVA applications on HCP.

!!! Remember to include Apache jars, into libs folder of your application, in order to build the servlet  !!!

Hope this help someone that is facing the same issue. In case you knows a different way, maybe a more standard one, on how to do that please share!!!

Cheers

Roberto Urban