Mastering Enterprise SOA with SAP NetWeaver® and mySAP™ ERP

Chapter 14. Creating Additional User Interfaces Using Services

SAP NetWeaver Portal (Portal) provides secure, role-based, and Web-based access for users to a company’s applications, information, and services. A company’s employees can be provided with a customizable work area where they can perform all their activities, including the capability to act on the tasks in their work lists, report time sheets, access business data, or manage their tasks among others. Business partners can also be provided with a Portal work area where they can handle all of their interactions with the company. Using the Portal, end customers can be provided access to shopping cart–like applications as well. All of these require user interfaces (UIs) that interact with back-end systems.

The importance of using enterprise services to expose back-end system data and the technologies that can be used to create the enterprise services themselves has been established in previous chapters. It has also been mentioned that this allows the enterprise services to be consumed by many different types of clients, including mobile devices, Adobe Forms, Microsoft Office tools, and really any development environment capable of invoking Web Services and handling the related response.

This chapter discusses different ways to consume enterprise services and create UIs that display the data using the Portal. The chapter covers two of the newest SAP technologies (namely, Web Dynpro and Visual Composer). While Web Dynpro is used ...