In my recent blog about the Product concept provided by the Composite Designer, I promised you to come back with some more details about how you can make use of this concept. I published the second part of this article series where I´m focusing on a step by step guide how to create a Product end-to-end as an umbrella for your Composite Application. I will start from creating the necessary artifacts in the System Landscape Directory (SLD), the Netweaver Development Infrastructure (NWDI) and completing the process in the Netweaver Developer Studio (NWDS). As I´m focusing on the specific thing required for the Product, you should ideally be familiar already with these tools. So, creating a track in NWDI and importing it into the NWDS should be known to you.
So, before running through the guide you should also make sure that you have the following software running:
Netweaver Developer Studio
System Landscape Directory Server (SLD)
Component Build Services (CBS) and Change Management Services (CMS)
For the server systems, you should at least have access to them and the necessary permissions to do changes there. The guide is based on CE 7.20. So, you should definitely use the Developer Studio in version 7.20. For SLD and the NWDI components, it is maybe not that critical. It should also work with older versions of SLD. However, the screenshots are reflecting the state of 7.20. Here you might face some differences.
Here is the link to the second article:
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/803d30d3-20d2-2d10-b890-ed030d3e5...
If you don´t know the first part of the article, you can find it here:
Simplify your Composite Application life by using the Product concept
It describes the basic concepts that I´m going to use in the step by step guide. So, it will be worth for you to read it before doing the exercise in the second part.
Last but not least, I again want to provide some common questions and answers you might have regarding the Product concept:
Question 1
Q: I´m already developing a Composite Application with CE, but haven´t used the Product so far. Is it possible to add this afterwards?
A: Sure, it is. To put your request into other words: you want to create a Product and include existing (Content) Software Components. In order to do this, you can run through the step by step guide. Whenever a Content Software Component is created, you should skip this step and simply reference the existing SC. This will automatically include this SC in your Product.
Question 2
Q: In my track, I have several editable SCs which I don´t want all to be part of my Product. How can I achieve this?
A: This is possible by including the editable SC in your track, but skipping the step in SLD to define a dependency from your Product Description SC to this editable SC. So, it won´t become a Content SC in your Product. As a prove point you can verify this when executing the “New Product Wizard” in Composite Designer. On the page showing the SCs, the mentioned SC should be visible in the bottom table, but it must not be checked. This means it is part of the track, but not part of your Product.
