Transaction Availability for Remote Sites/ SAP UI5 based App available to isolated work place.

1. Background: –

I heard the term TARS few weeks back, so I started exploring what exactly TARS is. TARS is nothing but a concept, it stands for Transaction Availability for Remote Sites. As a field technician, he may not have connectivity always at his work place but still he wants to access the asset information and update some information. The TARS will help field technicians to work anytime, anywhere regardless of the connectivity. In this blog, I will explain the theoretical architecture of the TARS based mobile App.

2. What’s TARS: –

As I mentioned above TARS is nothing but a concept. The main purpose of this concept is to make available few necessary Transactions to the field Technician on their mobile regardless of the connectivity. SAP transactions can be designed through SAP UI5 as a web page and the web page will communicate to local Data Base instead of centralized SAP system, sync server will take care of replicating data from SAP system to local Data Base. This TARS based mobile App. improves the field technician’s productivity and reduces the frustration.

3. Use Case: –

Most of the assets of utilities companies are located at isolated places where there is no connectivity. If a field technician goes to inspect or maintain an asset there, then he needs the history of the asset and he may need the manuals/videos to repair the asset. Some case he needs to capture some characteristics of asset in the system. All this will not be possible without offline App.  This scenario can be achieved fully by designing a TARS based mobile App.

4. Architecture: –

5. Technologies and Software required:
   1. SAP UI5.
   2. OData Service.
   3. SQL
   4. SQL Anywhere Data Base.
   5. MobiLink Server.

6. Building Blocks: –
   1. Centralized DB: – It’s the data base of an enterprise application. It can be SAP ERP or SAP HANA Data Base.
   2. Sync Server: – Sync server syncs data between centralized DB and many Remote data bases. MobiLink server is used as a sync server here. SAP HANA SP 10 supports MobiLink synchronization server to replicate data to remote Data Bases. In case of SAP ERP, MobiLink server can be used as sync server to sync data between SAP ERP and remote Data Bases.
   3. Local Data Base: – SQL Anywhere Data Base will be used as a local data base at remote sites. It’s a very light weight and compact data base. It can be easily hosted on a mobile device. We need to enable SQL Anywhere Data Base as a OData server. Once we enable this it will not only be the SQL Anywhere database, but also the OData server. We can write OData procedure, which can interact with our Data Base and it can be accessed through our UI5 application as a local OData service.
   4. App: It’s a App developed in SAP UI5, which is hosted on the mobile as a mobile App. This SAP UI5 App will communicate to the local OData services which are hosted on local Anywhere Data Base server. MobiLink server will take care of updating/refreshing data from/to local Data Base to/from centralized Data Base.

6. Conclusion: We can design a SAP UI5 based offline App without using SMP server.

I hope this helps.

In my next blog, I will explain the step by step process to design this App.

Thanks,

Sudhir.