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spichale
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
The SAP Community published a gamification feature with user badges and missions such as "Hello World!", "Blogger", and "Solver". Caroleigh Deneen already wrote about it. Since I was involved in the development of this feature as a software architect, I would like to share some technical aspects.

The Engine


The most important building block, the centerpiece, of this feature is the SAP Cloud Platform Gamification. This system runs the SAP Community-specific gamification rules to:

  • Assign missions to users

  • Update mission progress

  • Complete missions and assign badges


The SAP Cloud Platform Gamification manages all missions, badges, and the related business logic in one central point. The system also stores the progress and achievements.

The rules to handle the events are written in Drools:
updateAPIv1.givePoints($playerid, 'Experience Points', 1, 'Task completed.');
updateAPIv1.completeMission ($playerid, 'Troubleshooting');
updateAPIv1.addBadgeToPlayer($playerid, 'Champion Badge', '1. place');
update(engine.getPlayerById($playerid));

There are additional landscapes for development and testing. The test cases are based on automated JUnit tests.

Events, Events, Events


The service is connected to the SAP Community's messaging system and receives messages about user activities such as "publish blog post", "liked blog post", "follow user" etc. These messages are processed one after another by SAP Cloud Platform Gamification and the involved users are updated.



If eventually a user mission is completed, the Gamification Service will publish a message to notify other systems that need this kind of update. The message is, for instance, relevant for the activity stream and for the notification service.

Because of this messaging approach the involved systems are loosely coupled. The systems do not even know about each other. The message routing to the gamification system could be changed easily without any change to the overall architecture.

API Integration and Caching


The information in SAP Cloud Platform Gamification about a user's earned badges and the proceeding in-progress missions is available to other applications via an API. The API responses are cached and regularly updated by the client systems for performance reasons. I.e. after receiving a badge it could take a couple of minutes until the user eventually can see them.

Eventual Consistency


The user profiles (https://people.sap.com) run on several server instances with a shared cache that also includes the missions and badges from the Gamification Service. The cache is updated for individual users if their data is requested and if the cache entry is too old. For performance reasons, however, the cache update is executed asynchronously in the background and the result will only be visible for the next requests, i.e. the current request gets still the old cache data. But don't worry, the data will eventually become consistent. The cache update will be improved soon with an event-based mechanism.
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