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Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer

[CPI] Chrome Plugin to Enhance SAP Cloud Platform Integration Usability

Follow this post to stay current with new releases<<

EDIT: I created a new blog post with all features. This ist the new reference blog post.

Edit: Version 1.5 is out.

EDIT: Version 1.2.3 is released

EDIT: Version 1.1 is out. So if you work with variables, this could be something for you.

EDIT: Version 1.0 with InlineTrace-Feature is out now. More details in my new blog post.

EDIT: I had some issues with the Chrome Store. You will find the newest version 0.5.6 here:

 

 

If you had issus with the “Trace”-button, this is fixed now.

Please change to this version. The old Chrome Store entry will not be updated and will be deleted

 

EDIT: I was accepted for the Chrome Web Store. I recommend you to install the plugin from there to get updates automatically and to avoid developer mode.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/convista-sap-cpi-helper/epoggeaemnkacpinjfgccbjakglngkpb

Delete manually installed version before.

EDIT: Version 0.5.3 is now released. See  https://github.com/dbeck121/ConVista-CPI-Helper-Chrome-Extension

[Feature] Added last visited iflows in browser-bar-popup
[Feature] Added useful links in browser-bar-popup
[Feature] Added undeploy button in info-popup

Info: The screenshots do not show all features.

———

EDIT: Version 0.4.0 is now released. See  https://github.com/dbeck121/ConVista-CPI-Helper-Chrome-Extension

New feature: Popup with deployment infos.

———

EDIT: Version 0.3.1 is now released. See  https://github.com/dbeck121/ConVista-CPI-Helper-Chrome-Extension

New feature: See error message from processed messages directly in the integration flow designer.

———

Hello integrators,

my team and I have been working for about 3 years now with the SAP Cloud Platform Integration.

To make it short: Usability is not the core competence of SAP and so I decided to improve the daily life of my team with a plugin for the Chrome Browser to hack some usability improvements into the CPI.

Features

Switch on tracing

This is now done with one click from the integration flow designer 🙂 I counted at least 4 clicks before including open a new window.

View Messages

You get a small dragable sidebar with the last 10 message status directly in the integration flow designer.

View Infos and Trace

The small sidebar I mentioned before has two buttons to open a new window that brings you directly where you want to go. Of course, the trace is only available if you activated it before. But this is only one click away 🙂

How does it look like

If you installed the plugin, you will have two more buttons in the integration flow designer:

And if you press “Messages”:

Installation

Install directly from Chrome Web Store

After installation, you see the icon in the browser bar.

At first it is grey but it activates when you are on a CPI page. The new buttons will be added automatically when you are on the integration flow designer.

Contribution

My time is very limited so you are welcome to contribute with good comments, finding bugs or pull requests. More infos on the github page:

https://github.com/dbeck121/ConVista-CPI-Helper-Chrome-Extension

Ideas and contributions for new features are always welcome.

Ideas

  • Add possibility to show errors, payloads, properties and headers from messages directly in the design screen

Things to improve

  • Find a better way to get the X-CSRF-Token. Currently there is a background javascript for that.
  • Find a better way to detect url changes
  • Improve design

Bugs

There are probably many of them. Please leave a message.

I hope you like this project and it would be great if you leave some helpful comments.

Best regards

Dominic

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      Author's profile photo Bhaskar mamilla
      Bhaskar mamilla

      Hi Dominic,

       

      Such an awesome blog this is indeed really helpful for every CPI developer.it saves a lot of time

      i have just tried it it works like champ..:)Thank you Dominic.

       

      Regards,

      Bhaskar.

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Thats great to hear 🙂

      Author's profile photo Carlos OCAMPOS
      Carlos OCAMPOS

      Very Good Job Dominic,

      Very useful,

       

      Thanks for sharing

      Author's profile photo Cesar Mejia
      Cesar Mejia

      Thank you Dominic

       

      This a great help for us in CPI task.

       

      Best Regards

      Cesar

      Author's profile photo Vijay Devulapalli
      Vijay Devulapalli

      Fabulous!

      Not only you guys developed it, but shared with us, great job!

      Thanks @Dominic Beckbauer & Team!

      Author's profile photo Martin Pankraz
      Martin Pankraz

      Awesome Dominic! I always considered you fixing things that aren't broken as one of our greates assets on that C4/Hana Project. Excited for more things to come 🙂

      Till next time in Cologne.

      KR

      Martin

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Updated to v0.3.0

      Author's profile photo Umesh Reddy
      Umesh Reddy

      Hi Dominic,

      Fantastic blog for CPI developer. really it will save more time in navigating for monitoring and tracing.

      I can see there is a time difference in message monitoring and CPI helper chrome extension

      Message monitor

      can you please check this.

       

      Best Regards,

      Umesh Reddy

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Fixed in 0.3.1

      Author's profile photo Umesh Reddy
      Umesh Reddy

      Perfect, It's working now.Thanks

      Author's profile photo Kapila Epasinghe
      Kapila Epasinghe

      Fantastic product. Well done Dominic.

      Author's profile photo Iddo Rijsdijk
      Iddo Rijsdijk

      Good work!

      Author's profile photo Jonathan Prow
      Jonathan Prow

      Nicely done, works with Chromium Edge as well.

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Update to 0.4.0

      Author's profile photo Umesh Reddy
      Umesh Reddy

      Trace is not getting activated in 4.0

      Author's profile photo adrian di ruggiero
      adrian di ruggiero

      Hi Dominic!

      Thank you very much for doing it and share it with us!

      Adrián

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      0.5.3 is ready to download on github

      Author's profile photo Umesh Reddy
      Umesh Reddy

      Thank You very much for fixing the bugs Dominic. kudos to you.

      Umesh Reddy

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      The Plugin is now released in Chrome Web Store. Please use this version to stay up to date.

       

      https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/convista-sap-cpi-helper/epoggeaemnkacpinjfgccbjakglngkpb

       

      Author's profile photo Amit Kumar
      Amit Kumar

      Hi Dominic Beckbauer,

      thanks you very much for the sharing. its awesome.

      thanks

      Author's profile photo Emile Hermans
      Emile Hermans

      The link to chrome webstore is not available anymore. Should we go for github again?

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Hi,

      sorry, there were some issus with the chrome store. I had to publish again with a new id:

      https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/convista-sap-cpi-helper/epoggeaemnkacpinjfgccbjakglngkpb

      From now on, this will work and I promise that I will never press the unpublish button again ?

      Best regards

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Sorry, I had issues with the Chrome Store. We had a different oppinion what “unpublish” means. Sorry for that.

      Please change to the newest Chrome Store Entry here:

      https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/convista-sap-cpi-helper/epoggeaemnkacpinjfgccbjakglngkpb

      You have to uninstall the old version before. The old one will be deleted in the future.

      Sorry for the inconvenience.

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Version 1.0 is out with great new features. See my new blog post for details.

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      And we have 1.1 now 🙂

      Author's profile photo Ivo Vermeer
      Ivo Vermeer

      Great extension Dominic! I'm a happy user!

      Author's profile photo Manoj K
      Manoj K

      Hi Dominic ,

      Thanks for the plugin, this plugin works fine in Neo but in a Foundry environment, the "info" button does not give any output I get and error: {"status":406,"statusText":"Not Acceptable"}

      I believe this because the API is different in Neo and CF which plugin is referring.

      Thanks,

      Manoj

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Hi,

      thanks for the response. I do not have a CF CPI but I am using a trial account now.

      You are right with the API, I will try to fix that the next days. Did you find any other problems on CF?

      Best regards

      Dominic

      Author's profile photo Manoj Vempati
      Manoj Vempati

      Hi Dominic,

      This tool is very helpful. Thanks for sharing.

      I am testing it and found that inline debugging is not working as expected.

       

       

      Thanks,

      Manoj

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Manoj Vempati,

      thanks for your message.

      Maybe the plugin does not read all the Data. Are there many steps before the point where the blue items ends? Unfortunately I cant see the whole process in your screenshots.

      Best regards

      Dominic

      Author's profile photo Jonathan Prow
      Jonathan Prow

      Hi Dominic, thoughts on adding the iFlow version on the info tab?

      Author's profile photo Deepak Tandon
      Deepak Tandon

      Hi Dominic,

      This will make a CPI developer's life easy.

      I am having a small concern, adding ConVista  Extension Plugin to Google Chrome. I understand that using Trace mode directly will reduce the developer's time to check payload content but Is it advisable to add external plugin used to see the client data or Is there any security risk adding the extension.

       

      Thanks,

      Deepak

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Deepak Tandon,

      I understand your concern. It is still the trace mode of the cpi tenant. So there are no data stored in the plugin itself. The plugin just gives you a button for activation.

      If you have concerns, you can check the sources on github. It is open source. You will see, that no data is stored and there are no connections to the outside.

      Regards

      Dominic

      Author's profile photo Ajay Jadhav
      Ajay Jadhav

      Hi Dominic

       

      I am not able to get below features in Iflow

      this%20is%20in%20blog

       

      Below are the Errors in Inspect

      Error

      Error

       

      Kindly suggest

       

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer

      Which version are you running? 1.2.2 is the last one.

      Regards

      Author's profile photo Ajay Jadhav
      Ajay Jadhav

      Hi Dominic

       

      Yes current version  is 1.2.2

      Snap

      Snap

      Author's profile photo Ajay Jadhav
      Ajay Jadhav

      Any update Dominic

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer

      Hi Ajay Jadhav

       

      Sry for the late response. Seems like you are the only one with this error.

      Are you running the CPI on Cloud Foundry or Neo?

      Are all features not running? Or do you see the buttons?

      Have you tried to reinstall?

       

      Best regards

      Dominic

      Author's profile photo Ajay Jadhav
      Ajay Jadhav

      Hi Dominic

       

      Sorry was busy

       

      Are you running the CPI on Cloud Foundry or Neo? - Neo

      Are all features not running? Or do you see the buttons? Yup all features are not running like Trace , Message and Info

      Have you tried to reinstall? Yup

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Hi,

      I see a syntax error in your Error Log. But there should not be one. What version of Chrome do you use?

      It is strange that others do not have this problem.

      Best regards

      Dominic

      Author's profile photo Santhosh Kumar Vellingiri
      Santhosh Kumar Vellingiri

      Hi Dominic,

      I've been a fan of this tool, using it since inception 🙂 Thank you for it!

      I have one enhancement request. Presently the extension gets enabled only for CPI tenants on *.hana.ondemand.com. Is it possible to extend and allow enabling it for the custom hosts? We are running CPI on custom host too and I'm missing this extension access there.

      Thanks,
      Santhosh.

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer

      Hi Santhosh,

      I am not sure if this is possible, because I have to hardcode the URL.

      What you can try is using the sources (https://github.com/dbeck121/ConVista-CPI-Helper-Chrome-Extension#install-in-developer-mode-from-sources)

      you only have to modify the manifest.json file:

      "matches": [
      "https://*.yourdomain.tld/itspaces/*"
      ],

      I am not sure if this works but maybe you can try this.

       

      Best regards

      Dominic

      Author's profile photo Santhosh Kumar Vellingiri
      Santhosh Kumar Vellingiri

      Hi Dominic,

      Thank you. I tried this in the past, however unsuccessful when directly modified the matches in manifest file from chorme extension folder.

      I removed the extension, did an update today in two places i.e. permission and matches of the manifest file in downloaded copy, installed it once again in developer mode. This did the trick. Thank you again 🙂

      Thanks,
      Santhosh.

      Author's profile photo Martin Hartwig
      Martin Hartwig

      Great Addon! Unfortunately i couldnt enjoy it completeley since the 2 new buttons just wont appear. Do you have any suggestions?

      Cheers

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer

      Hi Martin,

      it works without problems in my tenants. Do you have a different URL or do you use Cloud Foundry? (I do not have a CF tenant for testing)

      Author's profile photo Martin Hartwig
      Martin Hartwig

      We use NeoCloud so far. I will try it with CF as soon as possible.

      Author's profile photo Ivo Vermeer
      Ivo Vermeer

      What is the domain that your CPI environmont is hosted on? I found that only my Neo clients seem to work, cloud foundry not (yet).

      I'd create a pull request to add CF support, but I don't have the time at the moment.

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Update! Version 1.2.3 is released:

      https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/convista-sap-cpi-helper/epoggeaemnkacpinjfgccbjakglngkpb

      https://blogs.sap.com/2021/03/12/cpi-convista-cpi-helper-the-show-goes-on/

      Author's profile photo Dominic Beckbauer
      Dominic Beckbauer
      Blog Post Author

      Update of the features: https://blogs.sap.com/2021/09/02/cpi-cpihelper-chrome-extension-swiss-army-knife-for-integrators/

      Author's profile photo Jim Bär
      Jim Bär

      Hi Dominic,

       

      I love this tool! Have been using it a lot during development.

      I do have a question. I want to trace the cause of a production issue and want to do that with a minimum set of permissions in Production. Is it possible to use CPI Helper in a read-only mode (besides activating the trace), and view for example the payload, and more importantly which role templates would I need in Cloud Foundry to be able to use the tool in Read only mode?

       

      Kind regards,

      Jim