SMART Client or SAP GUI for WebDynpro

[Former Member]

Hi somebody at SAP,

when is the SAP GUI for WebDynpro (the Smart client) released and where do we get it? The performance of the Alpha version I downloaded from SDN was very promising but unfortunately does not work with most of our complex WebDynpro applications. We are eagerly waiting for a new version because the server side rendering is just too slow for pages with a lot of tables, trees and tabs. Especially selecting rows in a table that has more than 20 rows are a pain in the butt. (Somebody at SAP told me that is probably due to the extensive use of tabstrips in our application).

Thanks in advance

David

[Former Member]

Hi David,

Could you please post the download link of SAP GUI for WebDynpro here? Also, what SAP GUI for WebDynpro can do for us as we are right now looking desperately for an immediate solution that will expose our SAP R/3 backend system to External users over the internet?

Appreciate your feedback.

Thanks, Saad

[Former Member]

Hi Saad,

the link for an alpha version of the SMART Gui for WebDynpro is here in SDN on the top page of the WebDynpro area. But here the link: https://www.sdn.sap.com/sdn/downloaditem.sdn?res=/html/webdynproclient_download.htm

. Concerning your other problem. I am in nowise an expert in this but I think that should do the Internet Transaction Server for you that can convert most of the Dynpros to Webenabled interfaces.

rgds

David

[Former Member]

Do you want to expose existing R/3 transactions or do you want to build new Web Dynpro applications? For Web Dynpro applications you only need a browser.

Armin

[Former Member]

Concerning your remarks on server-side rendering performance: Can you provide more info about your application?

What happens in your application when a table row is selected, i.e. the lead selection of a context node is changed?

Newer Web Dynpro versions also contain some performance tuning for tab strips.

For info on the release of the smart client, please contact the Web Dynpro product management (Karin Schattka or Marco Ertel).

Armin

[Former Member]

Hi Armin,

we installed SP9 last week. All our WD-Applications developed with SP4 run very slow now (displaying a loading-animation while loading). Especially changing

a tab of a tab strip is very very slow.

Furthermore the WDs are displayed different to SP4 (e.g. different colors).

Is that a known behaviour ? You wrote about perfomance

tuning for tab strip. Do we have to customize the Application Server in a different way as with SP4 ?

Regards,

Claus

[Former Member]

Armin,

thanks for the interest in our performance issue with server side rendering.

1) We have several applications. Usually these are applications with serveral tabstrips. In each tabstrip there can be several tables. Yes, we change the lead selection when we select a row (which is the default behaviour for tables).

2) We are still on Sp7 but i tried Sp9 at another customer and the performance was just the same.

rgds

David

[Former Member]

Hi Claus,

well I think I know the root of your problem. In SP4 the applications used client side rendering which is basically a javascript library that was downloaded to the client browser. This javascript client library was so intelligent to only transmit delta changes to the server and to paint the screen itself upon changed layout information from the server. This is quite low bandwidth but also quite buggy as one Internet Explorer seemed to interpret the javascript differently. Then the default rendering was changed to server side rendering which is: The server creates html pages (with a lot less javascript) and sends the whole pages back to the client. This seems to be a little more robust but of course uses a lot more bandwidth and for complex UI is also slow, as we experience now. This is also why the pages have a different look and feel now. The javascript client seems

to have a different stylesheet. Also you can see this now with tables. There is no load on demand anymore but you have a table you page through as it is normal in the web.

rgds

David

[Former Member]

Hi David,

thank you for your answer.

Do you know if the client side rendering development is stopped and only server side rendering will be the way for the future ?

We experienced that with complex WDs the applications is so slow, that you can't work with it. E.g. if you move the mouse between two buttons and don't click any button, only the moving over the buttons effect a CPU-Load up to 85% on a PIV-3GHz.

We also have WDs with a lot of tabstrips an tapstips in tapstrips. And the performace is about 5 times slower as with the SP4.

Do you know how i can switch the default rendering to client side rendering ?

Regards,

Claus

[Former Member]

Some remarks/corrections:

The new Web Dynpro (server-side) rendering is provably faster than the formerly used client-side framework. We did a lot of performance measurements during development that prove this.

The change in the visual design comes from the fact that the new rendering now uses SAP's Unified Rendering for all UI elements.

There is load-on-demand in tables and trees also with the new rendering.

On the other side, an application has to adhere to some conventions to avoid running into performance troubles. When using tab strips, in early versions of server-side rendering also the unselected tabs have been rendered. This allowed the browser to calculate the size of the tab strip from the sizes of the tabs but this can lead to performance decrease. In newer versions, the application can control this behaviour itself.

Feel free to contact us to discuss your concrete performance problems with the new rendering.

Armin

[Former Member]

Hi Armin,

an example of our application:

TabStrip with two tabs.

One of the two tabs includes another tabstrip with 6 tabs.

Each of the 6 tabs includes a table and 3-6 input fields + labels.

Using Server Side Rendering and toggling between tab 4 and tab 5 of the second tabstrip generate

the follwing output with the ?sap.session.ssr.showInfo=true - Extension:

Browser: 3325(parsing: 1472, HTML:441, JSBefore: 0, JSAfter 1412) J2EE: 63 Back-End:0

Estimated Response Size:127KN

The same scenario using Client side rendering creates the follwing output with the ?sap.csf.trace=2 - Extension.

001012 [CSF_View.onDefault] Received application event: [CSF_AppEvent]....

• SENDING SERVER REQUEST ***********************

000160 [CSF_TransportManager.onRequest] Sending server request ...

• RECEIVING SERVER RESPONSE "5". PROCESSING ... ***********************

000561 [CSF_TransportManager.onTransmissionBegin] Transmitting ...

000000 [CSF_TransportManager.onResponse] Receiving server response within 581ms

000040 [CSF_TransportManager.onTransmissionEnd] Transmitting done[ within 60 ms ]

• SERVER RESPONSE "5" PROCESSING DONE ***********************

So the CSR needs 581+60 = 641ms, the SSR needs 3325ms to toggle between two tabs.

There is no action bound to the tabstrip/tab.

How can i accelerate the SSR ?

Regards,

Claus

[Former Member]

As mentioned, in "early" versions of server-side rendering also the content of unselected tabs is rendered to enable the browser to calculate the needed space for the tabstrip.

This does not perform well if you have a large number of tabs with large content. So you can accelerate your application if you avoid such view compositions altogether.

If that is not an option, you might use the following technique to avoid rendering of unselected tabs:

Bind the visibility of the tab content areas to view context attributes. Use the TabStrip.onSelect event to set only the selected tab content to visible and all others to invisible.

Armin

[Former Member]

Armin,

thanks this helped already to get some performance improvements. Still changing the selection in a table is still quite slow. This is especially true for table with more than 20 visible rows and more than 10 columns.

rgds

David

[Former Member]

Hi Armin,

thanks for your help. The "Tabstrip-Performance" is

now really faster than with client-side rendering.

As David told changing the selection in a table is still quite slow.

Regards,

Claus