Iview / Webdynpro

[former_member872259]

Hi everybody!

I am a little bit confused.

So far I allways thought that Iviews are the technology to implement my own development. Later everything is build together on the Portal. Webdynpro is confusing me a little bit. It look to me as it was made to build complex application together, which I thought should be done by Iviews and a Portal.

When I want to develop something for a portal know, what is the right tool to develop this? WebDynpro?

Thanks for your answers ...

Bye Markus

[gregory_hawkins1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Marcus,

I think I can see the source of your confusion. There are many people who become confused with the myriad of choices and technologies that SAP provides. That said, I’ll try and take a stab at your question.

The Enterprise Portal is SAP’s platform for bringing web content from various sources together into one centralized and cohesive package. iViews are the portal’s handle on the various applications and are used for general layout of portal pages as well as providing a framework for the applications to communicate with each other through Portal Eventing (client-side eventing).

One popular Portal content delivery technique is to create a bunch of “mini-apps” that can be arranged on a given portal page and utilize portal events to communicate. Another option is to create full applications then present the full application via a single iView. Of course, you could also create a system that combines these two options.

Web Dynpro is a GUI technology used to create either mini-apps (that would use portal eventing to build a more complex application) or full applications that will be presented to the user through a single iView. Web Dynpro does not need to be used in conjunction with the Enterprise Portal, but the two products are definitely complementary.

Web Dynpro has the advantage of built-in features that limit (and simplify) the number of technologies that must be learned to deliver a world class business application for the web and it also helps enforce the valuable separation of visualization logic from business logic. Certain companies that have done extensive development for the web find this technology a bit limiting for these very same features.

Use of the Enterprise Portal does not require the use of Web Dynpro. The other technologies SAP supported for delivering content through EP are still supported. If your company values aligning their technology with SAP preferred approach, you will probably select to use Web Dynpro. SAP is using Web Dynpro for all their new web development and it is SAP’s preferred approach going forward.

In summary, each of the possible techniques for delivering content to the web that SAP supports may be the preferred technique for a given set of customer requirements and preferences. As a general rule, if you can live with the inherent limitations of Web Dynpro technology (and you have this technology available) you would most likely choose this approach to deliver applications for the web. (Of course, the right technology or place to write the business logic itself is another topic in and of itself.) As to whether to go with mini-apps or full Web Dynpro applications, the right answer seems to be somewhere in the middle. If all you ever need to interact with is other Web Dynpro applications, then Web Dynpro and SAP’s component technology is very suited to building the full application within Web Dynpro and presenting a single iView for the full application.

Hope this helps,

--Greg

[Former Member]

Hi,

this is really a good question.

The important thing: the UI technology for new content is 100% Web Dynpro. Even the whole portal UI will be move into this direction (i.e. the whole portal frame and all admin UIs of the portal will be implemented using Web Dynpro).

So, you should use Web Dynpro to implement your portal content. With NW04 each Web Dynpro application can be executed as exactly one iView. As this is a standard iView you can use it to define pages, worksets or roles.

The portal offers iViews and pages to put together "loosely coupled" content pieces. Sometimes these pages could act as "one application", but the basic idea of a portal is more to put everything together on one page. If you need really tight coupled scenarios, you should implement this as one application running as on iView.

If you do this and implement for example a full-screen application running as one iView the portal has no knowledge about the inner structure of this application.

If you for example use Web Dynpro components inside your Web Dynpro application the portal has no knowledge about this, and therefore all features provided for pages and iViews (like the dynamic relayouting) is not available for such full-screen iViews.

So you have to decide what you want: ONE big application running as one iView (an all parts of the application are really tightly coupled) or SEVERAL small applications running in different iViews and put together on one page (then you can for example change the layout of all these application pieces very easily).

This is the current status. And now the good news: with the future NetWeaver release we will skip this boundery

Best regards

Jochen