Configuring Fiori Launchpad for Push Notifications (loose ends)

You may have seen how to activate Push Notifications for workflow in Jocelyn Dart’s recent and comprehensive blog. If not, here is an appetizer to help you understand what your users are missing without it. This short blog builds on Jocelyn’s blog and describes two aspects to create the perfect environment for your users you may want to go this final mile.

1. Making the Notification Center visible in the Launchpad and
2. Configuring the launchpad so that when users log off they are returned to the logon screen.

If both of these have already been set up on your system then you do not need to read this blog any further.

A.Enabling the Notification Center in the Fiori Launchpad

The Notification Center is the icon that you can see at the top corner of the Fiori Launchpad (left hand corner in right-to-left languages, right elsewhere).

To enable it you need to set the “enableNotificationsUI” parameter and then assign this setting to your users through a role. This allows you to enable the notification center for some users but not for others.

Step 1: Assigning the parameter to a Launchpad category

You can either create your own catalog with your own parameter settings or you can use the delivered catalog /UI2/CONFIG_NOTIFICATION category, but you may need to apply Note 2426480 first.

If you want to create your own catalog then read on, else skip to step 2.

Invoke the launchpad designer for your Fiori environment and create a new catalog entry,

The wizard will prompt you for a unique ID and a name for this catalog and then you can create a target mapping for for it. The target mapping must include the parameter enableNotificationsUI set to true but may include other parameters, too. In the screenshot I have specified that the polling is reduced from the standard setting of 30 seconds to 15 seconds. This target mapping will override the SAP delivered settings and switch the Notification Center on.

The Application type is SAP UI5 Fiori app and the Title and ID are arbitrary. The parameters are described in online help.

Step 2 Assign the category to the user roles that require notifications.

On the backend, invoke the role maintenance transaction pfcg to edit the required role(s).

You can now insert the category that you just created (or the SAP-delivered catalog /UI2/CONFIG_NOTIFICATION) using the menu tab.

Hint: It is a good idea to check the names of the users who will see the notification center using the User tab.

Important: After you have saved these changes in pfcg you may need to wait for up to an hour for the changes to propagate to your Fiori environment since various caches are involved.

Your users now receive notifications in their Fiori launchpad.

Step 3 (optional) Personalization

Your users can suppress notifications based on the notification type using their settings in the launchpad.

If you do not want to allow this you can set the parameter renderers/fiori2/componentData/config/enablePersonalization to false, or assign the category /UI2/CONFIG_PERS_OFF to the role of these users.

B. Redirecting the launchpad’s logoff screen to the logon screen

You can use this method to set the logoff screen to anything you like, but most installations will want logoff to return to the logon screen. If this is not the case with your installation you should invoke the service-configuration transaction sicf in your backend.

Step 1: Choose the ALIAS hierarchy type.

Step 2: Creating the logoff service.

If the logoff node has not been created already it will not be shown in the list of services. You will need to create one.

Step 3: Select the logoff target service

Select the root node, and create a node for the logoff target element by opening the branches as follows: sap -> public -> bc -> icf 

Double-click on the logoff handler to select it as the target element.

Step 4: Specify the logoff URL

Set the logoff URL to the url of the logon screen. You’ll find this setting under the Error Pages tab.

Step 5. Wait for the cache to refresh

Wait a few minutes for the cache to refresh and then the next time your users log on and logoff their browser will redirected back to the logon screen specified by you.

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