I've been doing some work lately which has involved spending time in the FioriAppsLibrary. Since there is some information in here that functional consultants may not be overly familiar with, I've put this post together to help you delve a little bit deeper into the configuration of Transactional SAP S/4 HANA applications with the hope of helping others and also to learn a little more myself with some of the feedback and questions that may arise.
Let's start by looking at the FioriAppsLibrary and picking a suitable application type to examine in some detail. For this example I've chosen the Manage Stock application used by Inventory Managers. Select the Implementation Information tab and expand the Configuration dropdown. You'll notice that there are several categories associated with the configuration. We'll focus on their applicability to our own system, in this case a SAP S/4 HANA 1709 system.
The ICF nodes can be checked using transaction SICF and navigating to the 'path to ICF node' you can see in the configuration information from the FioriAppsLibrary documentation. There are quicker ways of getting to the service, but you may see other services of interest along the way!
Now let's dig deeper and look at the OData service in some detail. Go to transaction /IWFND/MAINT_SERVICE, search for the ODATA service name using the search function and when you're ready (lot's to explore in here) highlight our row and select SAP Gateway Client. We're going to look at the this in some detail and generate some responses.
My preference is to read responses as JavaScript object notation so I've switched my format preference from xml to json. You do not have to do this, you can view the responses as xml if you wish. Next hit execute to run a GET HTTP method without passing any parameters. You'll get a response showing the entity sets without any associated data (since we didn’t specify any in our request URI). This is quite useful, since we now know what we can work with. NOTE: There are other ways of finding these entity sets, but we can look at an example HTTP response from here.
So let's do just that! We'll pass CalculatedStockChangeTypes and seek all results available. Notice the URI's returned with each result. We now have the different codes available for CalculatedStockChangeTypes. Not much practical value from this example, but more complex, well thought-out, Request URI's should help you return high value responses. You can also explore working with other HTTP Methods here and there is plenty of documentation around on this.
Before we move away from Odata services, lets take a quick look in the SAP Gateway Service Builder using transaction SEGW. You'll need to specify your project, in this case we're looking at the MMIM_MATDOC project which contains the data model, runtime artifacts etc.
We'll look at these 3 together. Open your Launchpad Designer via the browser, logon with an administrative user with a fair level of authorization and select Catalogs.We're going to search for the Technical Catalog item associated with our chosen app 'Manage Stock': SAP_TC_PRC_IM_COMMON. We can now look at target mapping and actions for the application. If you select Configure Columns here you'll be able to review more appropriate information and hide irrelevant information.
While we're still in the Launchpad Designer lets select groups and look at the business group provided with Manage Stock: SAP_MM_BCG_IM_MANAGE.
Finally, we'll look at the business role mentioned: SAP_BR_INVENTORY_MANAGER in transaction PFCG. Plenty of information out there about business roles and suffice to say it’s a broad topic but by giving this role to a user (SU01) they will be able to utilize any functional capabilities that come with the Manage Stock application. For the administrative transactions we've mentioned, a higher level of authorization will be required.
Let's start by looking at the FioriAppsLibrary and picking a suitable application type to examine in some detail. For this example I've chosen the Manage Stock application used by Inventory Managers. Select the Implementation Information tab and expand the Configuration dropdown. You'll notice that there are several categories associated with the configuration. We'll focus on their applicability to our own system, in this case a SAP S/4 HANA 1709 system.
ICF Nodes:
The ICF nodes can be checked using transaction SICF and navigating to the 'path to ICF node' you can see in the configuration information from the FioriAppsLibrary documentation. There are quicker ways of getting to the service, but you may see other services of interest along the way!
OData Services:
Now let's dig deeper and look at the OData service in some detail. Go to transaction /IWFND/MAINT_SERVICE, search for the ODATA service name using the search function and when you're ready (lot's to explore in here) highlight our row and select SAP Gateway Client. We're going to look at the this in some detail and generate some responses.
My preference is to read responses as JavaScript object notation so I've switched my format preference from xml to json. You do not have to do this, you can view the responses as xml if you wish. Next hit execute to run a GET HTTP method without passing any parameters. You'll get a response showing the entity sets without any associated data (since we didn’t specify any in our request URI). This is quite useful, since we now know what we can work with. NOTE: There are other ways of finding these entity sets, but we can look at an example HTTP response from here.
So let's do just that! We'll pass CalculatedStockChangeTypes and seek all results available. Notice the URI's returned with each result. We now have the different codes available for CalculatedStockChangeTypes. Not much practical value from this example, but more complex, well thought-out, Request URI's should help you return high value responses. You can also explore working with other HTTP Methods here and there is plenty of documentation around on this.
Before we move away from Odata services, lets take a quick look in the SAP Gateway Service Builder using transaction SEGW. You'll need to specify your project, in this case we're looking at the MMIM_MATDOC project which contains the data model, runtime artifacts etc.
Technical Configuration, Target Mapping(s) and App Launcher(s):
We'll look at these 3 together. Open your Launchpad Designer via the browser, logon with an administrative user with a fair level of authorization and select Catalogs.We're going to search for the Technical Catalog item associated with our chosen app 'Manage Stock': SAP_TC_PRC_IM_COMMON. We can now look at target mapping and actions for the application. If you select Configure Columns here you'll be able to review more appropriate information and hide irrelevant information.
Business Group(s):
While we're still in the Launchpad Designer lets select groups and look at the business group provided with Manage Stock: SAP_MM_BCG_IM_MANAGE.
Business Role(s):
Finally, we'll look at the business role mentioned: SAP_BR_INVENTORY_MANAGER in transaction PFCG. Plenty of information out there about business roles and suffice to say it’s a broad topic but by giving this role to a user (SU01) they will be able to utilize any functional capabilities that come with the Manage Stock application. For the administrative transactions we've mentioned, a higher level of authorization will be required.
Hopefully this short blog has given you a little bit of depth to allow you to examine some of the configuration details associated with transactional applications listed in the FioriAppsLibrary.
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