Navigation Configuration for News Tile

[sard]

Hello Everyone. It is almost Super Bowl time, GO PEYTON !!!

I spent a long time, much more than my employers will be happy with, googling and poring over lot of stuff on SCN trying to find ways to setup the fiori news tile correctly. I did not find any that illustrated the way to set up navigation from the news tile. I hope this will help a few others searching for similar information.

We are in the process of rolling out the Fiori Launchpad with a few ESS Apps and a news tile. The ESS Apps were working alright. The news tile of course is a great looking app, but when we tried to navigate to the news item that scrolled across it gave the 'Could not open the App' error dialog.

Initially we thought that's how the news tile had been designed to function, as the SAP Help documentation mentioned

• Bookmarking and direct navigation to the list of feed articles is not supported.

News Tile - User Interface Add-On for SAP NetWeaver - SAP Library

There were many discussions in the forums that suggested applying OSS Notes, higher level UI, etc. None of that would work as we were almost current with our SP levels. There was however a cryptic one liner 'Can you share your tile setting and target mapping?' from masayuki.sekiharain

Fiori News Tile - no articles displayed asking to check the navigation for the tile.

I did not find any documentation or SAP Help that explained the way to configure the news tile navigation So I tried and set it up as I have explained below. Hope it is the right way, if not, please feel free to correct me and suggest the right approach.

The news tile when created does not have a navigation row.

So I thought I should create a navigation entry for the news tile and assign it to one of the Launch Pad roles that we were already using. I wasn't sure what needed to be the Semantic Object for navigation, I only thought it should be something related to News. So I typed 'News' and found the 'NewsItem' Semantic Object.

I wasn't sure of the Action either, so entered 'display' like most others had and headed to LPD_CUST to create a new item in the Launchpad Role.

And there in LPD_CUST I saw SPBUTIL NEWSITEM, something I hadn't noticed before.

I took a look and it had NewsApp as Application Alias. I went back to Launchpad Designer and corrected the configuration.

Now the news tile navigation works well and looks so beautiful.

Note: Please ... this is my first blog contribution in spite of being around quite long. Not that I I did not want to contribute, I wish I knew enough to write something here. I am that ABAPer who knows just enough to stay paid in my job.