If you’ve been using Business Client 4 (a.k.a NWBC 4) for a while and are moving to version 5 or 6, or even if you are just starting out on your Business Client journey you will likely be faced with setting up system connections for the Business Client system selector. When faced with this recently I needed to refresh my memory on how all this worked so went to the SAP Help documentation and had a read...
Administrator Configuration - User Interface Add-On for SAP NetWeaver - SAP Library
On the face of it is seemed fairly straightforward but as soon as I started digging in a bit I realised that I was not fully understanding how it was working. After a bit of trial and error I think I’ve worked out what’s going on so I thought I’d share it here and hopefully save others some of the pain.
So to cut to the chase this was my “AH-HA" moment… In NWBC 4 you basically had the NwbcOptions.xml file in which you could configure all the options for NWBC as well as the system connection details. In BC 5 and 6 you still have the NwbcOptions.xml BUT you no longer configure the system connection details in this file, it is only used purely for NWBC options, no systems. You also still have the NwbcRemoteOptions.xml file in which you can point to a remote NwbcOptions.xml file (e.g. one you store on a web server or file share) - but to reiterate this is only for NWBC options not for system connections.
So "Where do the system details go now?" I hear you ask…
All the system details are now stored in the SAPUILandscape XML files. That’s files with an “s”… yes there are two of them. One that is for end user defined systems called SAPUILandscape.xml and one for administrator defined systems SAPUILandscapeGlobal.xml. They are both located in the same folder on the user's PC (%APPDATA%/SAP/Common).
So as an administrator if you would like to make a standard set of systems available to all your end users you can create the SAPUILandscapeGlobal.xml file and distribute it to your users. You can either push the file to the end user’s PC or you can let the end user pull the file from a web server or file share. The documentation actually does a fairly decent job of explaining that:
There are a couple of ways to achieve the distribution of the centrally defined connection settings. One way is you can set the location of the file in the registry, via key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\SAP\SAPLogon\Options, for example you might do this via a group policy setting that is pushed out to users. Alternatively you can push out a version of the SAPUILandscapeGlobal.xml file to the local PC (maybe you package it up and it is included when the user installs NWBC).
Inside that SAPUILandscapeGlobal.xml file you can point to additional files located on a file share or web server. The part of the file you need to take care of to do this is the <Includes></Includes> section. You can even include multiple files, they need to be in the format of the SAPUILandscape.xml file and then they will be merged and included for you.
<Includes>
<Include index="1" url="http://myserver.mydomain/mySAPUILandscape.xml"/>
</Includes>
This works similarly to how the NwbcRemoteOptions.xml file worked in NWBC 4 for system connections, allowing you to maintain the list of systems centrally and have them automagically update on the NWBC client.
Well I hope that’s been helpful to you. If it has please let me know and if you have any questions or comments or can add anything to this please do below. Thanks.
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