OpenUI5 App Demo: Testing SAP PI/PO systems #UI5Top5

Update 2018-06-13: We have been selected as a finalist for the UI5Top5. Check the other cool app on the blog by Twan van den Broek please help us by selecting like to help us win. 

I have always been frustrated with how difficult it was to make testing of the SAP PI/PO interfaces and the amount of time spend on making the testing work. Too many manual steps in it. So two years ago I got an idea to make an application that would allow users to setup test case of their SAP PI/PO system in a generic way. It became the Figaf IRT tool.

I create a video that shows how the application works.

So the how the idea is to be able to control the SAP PI API is providing to list the different interfaces on the different SAP PI/PO systems in the landscape. So it would contain a lot of tables with the different interfaces and tests performed.

I wanted to make the tool as friendly as possible and also make it look familiar to SAP users. So I decided to use SAP UI5. In the beginning, we were running on SAP AS Java so we used SAP UI5. Now we run on a separate java server so we are using OpenUI5.

I have chosen to outsource the development so the main team did not have any experience SAP technologies in the beginning. To get started we had one SAPUI5 developer to set our application, but now the team is doing full stack development.

IRT backend is a Java-based application where we are using Spring to expose REST services for the UI5 application. In most cases, views in the IRT are tables with many control options and different input forms (simple and complex). Having UI5 we are using a wide range of components provided out of the box to fit requirements and improve user experience.

The thing that we were a bit challenged about was to create a diff tool that allows users to compare two different messages. Users should be able to view big documents side by side and see what the difference between them is. This required us to create a new component using the UI5 framework that allows users to see the differences between two documents.

We needed to connect this with a function to allow pagination of the data. Users will be able to see the documents side by side and see the differences easily.

Diff Viewer has been designed to handle different response types which are based on requested comparison strategy type: element-based diff (XML, JSON, X12, EDIFACT), character-based diff (TEXT, BINARY). Binary diff viewer is a Hex viewer.

We have a free version of the tool that allows users to test their SAP PI/PO system. So they can start testing their most critical interfaces now and ensure they work.