Substitution on SCP Workflow from portal site

Topic

Recently – on time according to roadmap – SAP implemented very important functionality for its SCP CF Workflow service – Substitution and task delegation.

I personally found that information from great blog post of Christian Loos, where he describes how to enable substitution and how to use it.

Problem

Of course I had to try it by myself immediately, and I was able to make it work. It was really nice, because we have several WF implementations for our customers and substitution functionality was one of things which was requested from them.

But our solution uses SaaS portal site to provide access to my inbox application for approvers, instead of portal service from MTAR app.

Note: You can find how to add My Inbox app to SaaS portal in my other blog post.

And unfortunately,  when I passed the parameters to the My Inbox – nothing happened.  Substitution was not enabled in user menu.

Analysis

Luckily, Christian Loos was able to find out the reason – My Inbox app is embedded via iframe in SaaS portal site and therefore, the parameters are not correctly passed. Portal team now knows about the problem, and they are working on deeper integration which will solve the problem. According to Christian – the integration should be ready in Q1/2021.

But until they will implement the standard solution, I have found out a workaround, which can help to deliver the substitution functionality to customer, but also leverage the better role management of SaaS portal site.

It is not the nicest solution – workarounds shouldn`t be – but hey – at least, it works.

Solution

Prerequisites

Let`s assume, that you have your MTAR application which contains wf module and portal module. On that portal module, you have defined tile with My inbox application.

Note: You can follow this blog to build such application.

But at the same time, you want to provide access for the customer (approver) to the My Inbox using the SaaS portal site, because it allows you to manage access to different applications on a portal using roles.

Note: You are not able to hide app tiles on portal site from MTAR.

Description of workaround

We will create an app tile in SaaS portal site which will open My Inbox application, but not directly served through SaaS portal, but actually by portal from MTAR. And because we know, that  substitution functionality is working in portal from MTAR – it should work also in this case.

Step by step

Let`s find URL of My Inbox application, when it is opened through portal site from MTAR.

So open url of your deployed approuter, and that should get you to the portal site, you defined in your MTAR application.

Now when you open My Inbox application, copy its URL address.

Now we need to create new App tile in the Content manager of SaaS portal.

It is important to set these attributes:

Also uncheck the checkbox named: Add intent and default SAP parameters to URL.

On the second tab – Navigation add just some dummy Semantic object and Action. It does not matter on that values, but they are mandatory.

Add tile name and other visual parameters and save it.

Also add the app to the group and role, so user will see it on the launchpad.

And this is it!

Now when you will open this new My Inbox application, new tab with My inbox will be opened, but not served in SaaS approuter via iframe, but directly from your other portal site defined in MTAR app.

And when you open your user menu, you should see the substitution menu items.

Sorry for the czech language.

Disclaimer:

All pictures in this blog was created by myself.

This blog post is also published on my personal blog.