Adding Tile in Fiori Launchpad to Start Workflow in Cloud Foundry

In previous blog of my series, I explained how to create a fiori application to start the workflow in SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry environment.

Once you have designed and deployed your Fiori application, you might have the need to expose this application as a tile in your existing or new Portal Fiori Launchpad. In this blog, I will explain how you can achieve that.

For this I have added Fiori Launchpad module in my existing MTA. You can also choose to create a separate MTA project with Fiori Launchpad module.

Step 1: Enabling Cross-App Navigation in your Fiori Application

In order to add your application as a tile in Portal Fiori Launchpad, you need to enable cross-app navigation in your application by assigning intents. You can do that in manifest.json to add crossNavigation element with following details.

For more information read the documentation.

,

        "crossNavigation": {
            "context": {},
            "inbounds": {
                "newtile": {
                    "semanticObject": "capex",
                    "action": "startworkflow",
                    "icon": "sap-icon://begin",
                    "title": "Capital Expenditure Request",
                    "subTitle": "Start Workflow"
                }
            }
        }

Step 2: Update MTA Project Descriptor

As your custom application makes a call to the workflow API for starting the workflow and now we are routing the access of this application via the portal launchpad tile so the workflow service instance dependency have to be added to the Fiori Launchpad Module in mta.yaml

Note: If you are creating a separate multitarget application, then you also need to add the workflow service instance in the resources section of mta.yaml (see line 61 – 65 in the screenshot below)

Step 3:  Add tile to the Launchpad

The final step is to add a new tile in the launchpad module. This is done by updating CommonDataModel.json file.

When you add the new tile in CommonDataModel.json, you will get a pop-up where you can choose from existing applications (that have cross-navigation enabled) or manually add the new ones.

In my example, as the launchpad and custom UI5 applications are in the same MTA project (multitarget application) so the popup already discovers it. But if you are creating a separate MTA project then you need to add it manually using the + icon (as seen in the screenshot below) and then manually enter App ID and Intent Navigation.

note: App ID you can get from the manifest.json file of your start application and Intent Navigation is combination of semanticObject and action like semanticObject-action

Finally build and deploy the MTA and access the deployed launchpad application from cockpit.

Yet again, in 3 simple steps you can add your custom application as a tile in FLP. I have updated the sample workflow start application project from my last blog to also include the Fiori Launchpad module. All you need is to import:

• Download the project.
• extract the zip and import the tar file in your business application studio.
• open mta.yaml file and adjust the workflow and portal instance name and the plan based on the cloud tenant you are going to deploy the application
• build & deploy the application.

Related Resources

• starting workflow from custom task UI
• how to use custom task UI as user task in your workflow
• calling external API from custom task UI