SAP Cloud Platform Portal – Freestyle site

I have worked on SAP Portal on-premise edition for a while, and recently, I got to work on SAP Cloud Portal. I wanted to share some of our experiences here and help others navigate around some of the limitations we faced.

Right off the bat, the fresh look and feel, and compatibility with all modern browsers is very pleasing as it was always challenging to modernize the on-premise enterprise portal (frames, compatibility etc… you know what I’m talking about)…

Below are some of our lessons learned:

(1) Where are Out of the box Fiori apps?

When your company purchases the SAP Fiori cloud subscription, you will go into SCP>Subscriptions and see only few apps. What gives!

In order to display the SAP out of the box apps, you must first create a portal site. I mostly create a simple Fiori Launchpad site named ‘Starter Site’.

While creating the first site, you will get prompted to install Business Content, so just follow along…

Add content and then activate content.

Now go back to Subscriptions, and you should see additional apps in Subscribed area:

Once you see your Fiori apps in Subscribed area, then one item you want to check is the ALIAS.

**I am assuming you have read the App documentation, and did all the backend gateway work (installed components, enabled oData, created destinations on SCP, and configured Cloud Connector etc…).

If your alias (pointing to your OData Services) is different than default (GATEWAY), then you have to update the ALIAS within application.

Update ALIAS HERE:

Now click on the app link to test. Should be good…

(2) Freestyle Site – Only one Fiori Launchpad page is allowed

If you are planning to add multiple isolated launchpads in one freestyle style, it is not possible.  The launchpad is flexible, so you can control with roles only, but only one launchpad.

(3) Portal Roles\Groups\Users

Plan out your Roles\Groups\Users before starting to build pages. You will be tempted to make copies of pages, and that is fine, but if you have any mistakes on the source page, it will get replicated. For example, if source page has open authorizations (shown below), then this will also get replicated to all copies. So make a source page for each role, if possible.

Basically, this is the concept:

• Groups get created in SCP subaccount.
• Roles get created within Individual Portal Site.
• Within a site, in the Launchpad, create Role with exact same name as Roles created in Portal site.
• Then assign catalogs to this role.

(4) Keep checking your mobile view

As you are adding widgets, keep checking how they arrange on mobile device. Even though it is responsive, sometimes the titles don’t align on mobile the way you want.  In the standard layout, you can use rowspan but no colspan (html table terms), so you have to make sure the wrap on mobile happens correctly.

(5) Destination with Parameter

We could not add parameters to Destination. We wanted to make a SCP destination such as http://www.sf….?company=<company_id>. Since destinations are subaccount based, we wanted to control the link by just updating the destinations, but couldn’t. So we had to place the “company” as a parameter in the tile instead, which was not ideal.

If anyone has a solution then we would love to hear about it, but this is one of the limitations we faced!

(6) CSS in UI Theme Designer

Don’t be afraid to use the CSS in theme designer.

The CSS option came in very handy for us.  For example, we faced an issue with dropdown menu hiding behind the PDF file, and we had to change the z-index as following:

I hope this information benefits your project. And, as always, feel free to correct me at any point.

Thank you,
Harman Shahi