EP: Portal on Device – Safari iPad/iPhone (High Level)

Introduction 

As the world of emerging technologies continues to provide next generation computing devices the world of business continues to become more mobile. Business organizations may choose to have mobile accessible Portal landscapes to enable end-users to access organizational applications, data and information while on the go. The notion of Portal On Device in itself not a brand new Product Offering or recent roll out but rather a functional extension of the existing NW Portal setup.

Issues Noted & High Level Analysis

Lets say you encounter an issue that is only reproducible (on mobile) with Safari iOS (iPad & iPhone) but the same functionality is fine on a Windows Desktop.

If you encounter such behavior there are a few simple analysis approaches to initially follow:

• Is the behavior reproducible (desktop) on any other web browser platform type?
• Are all iView types affected in this instance e.g. URL iViews, AI etc?
• What framework is the issue occurring with?

An important point to highlight is that  from the Portal perspective there are indeed many restrictions that apply to Mobile Devices and in particular “iViews” and additional details surrounding this can be found in the WIKI outlined below.

– https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/WDABAP/Browser+supporting

For example if we review this section of Note 1705067 ‘Known issues for Portal on Device’: ‘When using AI (Application Integration) iViews, to enable session
management and proper functionality, place these iViews in the Launcher, and configure them to open in a new window (Launch in New Window = Display in Separate Headerless Portal Window).

• Do not place such iViews in the Home pages.’

Framework

One important point to highlight in the case of an issue being encountered is to ensure that you are not following aa unsupported scenario i.e. regular framework page on mobile device.

• The functional recommendation is to utilize the FLP@EP framework page in order to achieve the desired functionality without any issues.

There have been underlying changes within the Portal setup regarding the functional support of specific Frameworks (on Mobile). In theory the standardized framework page for portal on device is based on HTML5. By standard here I am making reference to the Classic Framework Page (CFP).

• By default, the SAP NetWeaver Portal does not support HTML5.

For example from the perspective of a desktop setup the Unified Framework Page will provide functionality on running the portal in a standard setup (SAP UI5 + HTML5 Applications) can be run within the Portal Framework (without a new window).

This new framework page is designed for desktop devices. For mobile consumption of this portal the mobile framework page in itself is recommended

Due to the ehancements made possible by Fiori the recommendation from Development for this particular scenario would be to follow the FLP@EP framework page

https://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw74/helpdata/en/fa/7fb06cc6f747719d798eeff3e30e4e/frameset.htm

– The portal framework page for mobile is FFP (Fiori Framework Page, which is FLP on EP).

Important Troubleshooting Reference Guides

• SAP Note: 1705067 – Known issues for Portal on Device
• SAP KBA: 2396661 – Problems with web dynpro on mobile using FFP