SAP Fiori Launchpad: Initial load of tiles fails after upgrade

Introduction

Keeping software always up to date is an essential part of any IT infrastructure. In our daily business, we support many customers when they upgrade their SAPUI5 version. In some of our upgrade activities, we were facing the issue that after upgrading the tiles of the SAP Fiori Launchpad didn’t load anymore. In our analysis we were able to drill down the root cause to the combined usage of extension points. Since this is a general problem, in this blog post we are going to share the details of our analysis and provide a solution.

Issue

We run SAP Fiori Launchpad with tiles and extension points. All tiles are custom implemented applications and we use standard extension points. During our upgrade, we updated our UI5-version from 1.44.25 to 1.60.12. After the upgrade we fixed obvious errors like short dumps and errors in the error log. Furthermore, we adapted apps and SAP Fiori Launchpad extension in order to be in line with our upgraded SAPUI5 version. Afterwards, while testing we got an issue that our tiles failed to load and the SAP Fiori Launchpad was empty. However, our SAP Fiori Launchpad extensions were loaded successfully.

Analysis

In our analysis, we could identify that tiles were loaded when we exclude or delay our SAP Fiori Launchpad extensions. So, it seems obvious, that the SAP Fiori Launchpad extensions are causing the issue. We are using two extensions points at the header (title, action icons) and one at the footer. Regardless which extension points at the header we use, once we added the extension at the footer, tiles failed to load. Thus, the root cause of the issue is the combined usage of extension points at header and footer.

Solution

In order to temporary fix the issue, we delayed loading our footer extension by 2 seconds. The coding can be seen in the screenshot below . SAP has provided a solution in SAPUI5 Version 1.60.15.

this.setTitle();
this.setHeaderItem();
window.setTimeout(function(){
  this.setFooter();
}.bind(this), 2000);

Conclusion

If you plan to use extension points for header and footer in SAP Fiori Launchpad with SAPUI5 Version 1.60, keep in mind, that this could lead to an issue during the initial load of tiles. If you run into the same issue you should upgrade to SAPUI5 version 1.60.15. For details regarding patching your system refer to SAP Note 2711925.

About the authors 

Natalie Uhly

Natalie Uhly is SAP Consultant at Q_PERIOR focusing on technology and innovation. Her professional interests cover ABAP including ABAP CDS and UI technologies especially SAPUI5.

Michael Christa

Michael Christa is SAP Consultant at Q_PERIOR focusing on technology and innovation. His professional interests are developing end-to-end SAPUI5 applications as well as working with the SAP Cloud Platform.