Alternate "Front-Ends" for xMII

[Former Member]

Hi, all.

I think it would be interesting to start a discussion about how to leverage other front-end applications for xMII. Examples that I've used (besides xMII's UI, which I think does a lot), are Visual Composer, Visual Basic/C# .NET, Adobe Flex/Flash, Excel, InfoPath.

Anyone else tried any others?

The techniques I've used all depending on making XML requests to the xMII back-end, but in addition to using them directly, I've wrapped them in ADO.NET and JDBC.

Interestingly, I've still found xMII's native UI to be pretty darn powerful even when compared to these tools. The one that I really like these days is Flex. Pretty amazing what can be done combining Flex with xMII. Has anyone else tried this yet?

Best regards,

Rick

[Former Member]

Rick Bullotta,

I would like to learn more of how you integrated Adobe with xMII. Please contact me at <<Pls do not post email ids on the forum>>

Message was edited by:

Abesh Bhattacharjee

[Former Member]

Coming from a .NET development background typically with agile principles in large teams, i found myself wanting more productivity tools to use in my xMII project.

I wrote a code anaysis tool (similar to FXCop for those who know the .NET space), which basically scans your trx files and enforces "domain specific" rules, represented as XPath expressions.

Some patterns we want to enforce on our xMII developers are:

Use certain global properties for action block links

Don’t tick 'terminate with error' on terminate blocks

Use 'reset state' on transaction calls

Expose certain transaction properties of certain types

Avoid default values on transaction properties

Pass in correct params to a common transaction.

(Note: these rules are specific to my project and do not apply to all projects)

These sorts of things are too tedious to check when you have 100's or 1000’s of transactions in your project.

We have enforced about 40 rules which this application recourses through the transaction folder on the xMII server and emails all the developers a list of violations.

These rules are all configured on the fly and can be tailored to enforce anything.

Another tool I wrote is 'Find All References', this will take a transaction name as input and display a list of transactions that call it via a TransactionCall action block. It will also search for certain strings in a transaction and certain action blocks.

I'm also prepared to share my C# code if anyone is interested.

Regards,

Matt Tuohy

[Former Member]

Hi Matthew,

I will be interested in this code since I'm in the process where I need to do a code review on an xMII implementation and this would come in handy

thanks

null

[Former Member]

I forgot one other "front-end" that I've been using. I successfully integrated xMII with the Adobe PDF engine. Not only for data, but I was even able to link/embed xMII charts in Adobe PDF forms, and have them rendered using the Adobe forms server that is built into WebAS...pretty cool for building reports.

[Former Member]

This is a subject that I've been interested in exploring since the version 10. I would like to use the connectors, data-shaping and business logic capabilities of xMII with the dynamics of Infopath, ADO.NET, ASP.NET and C#. I have done some experimentation but would be really interested in the suggested methods for using xMII functionality from external applications.

[Former Member]

Hi, Mark.

How goes it?

For InfoPath, I used the web service interface to xMII business logic services (WSDLGen). For all others, I either made direct URL calls and received the XML stream or used an ADO.NET wrapper that I created, which allows xMII query templates to appear as database tables to an ADO.NET client application. The ADO.NET wrapper hid the same technique (URL<->XML).

One other .NET-specific thing: I also wrote an IE embeddable .NET control in C# that calls the xMII backend using the same technique, but the UI for the widget uses GDI+ calls to draw a chart.

Best regards,

Rick

[Former Member]

Also, one cool feature I added to the ADO.NET wrapper is that it can be data-bound (in read-only mode), just like any other ADO.NET data source...

- Rick

[Former Member]

Everything is great xMII is being used to great extents.

I've been working on this application that I would like to integrate with xMII and some source code examples of the plugin/wrapper would be helpful. Is this process documented anywhere? I did find a document here on the Infopath to SAP topic but not xMII. What you discussed sounds like exactly what I need since I've developed the application in C#.

[Former Member]

Easiest way to integrate from C# is using an XMLTextReader as in:

			string sURL = "http://yourserver/Lighthammer/Illuminator?QueryTemplate=MyFolder/MyTemplate&Content-Type=text/xml";

			sURL += "&IllumLoginName=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(UserID);
			sURL += "&IllumLoginPassword=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(Password);

			XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
			doc.Load(new XmlTextReader(sURL));
			XmlNodeList items = doc.GetElementsByTagName("Row");
                        {...do your work with the results...}

Alternatively, I could send you the source code and a sample app for the ADO.NET wrapper. Drop me an e-mail.

- Rick

[Former Member]

Rick, could you please share some of your C# code with me?

Regards.

[Former Member]

I've been thinking about how xMII could leverage Ruby on Rails and vice versa. The scaffolding behind Rails is so quick and ActiveRecord class could save a bunch of dev time.

[abesh]

Yahoo! Widgets ?

<a href="/people/abesh.bhattacharjee/blog/2006/12/19/harnessing-the-power-of-xmii-using-yahoo-widgets">/people/abesh.bhattacharjee/blog/2006/12/19/harnessing-the-power-of-xmii-using-yahoo-widgets</a>

[former_member4529]

Hi Rick,

I once tried using Web Dynpro Java as the xMII's frontend ( though of course using the applets as it is) instead of the html/irpt pages. I compiled my experiences in this document :

<a href="https://www.sdn.sap.comhttp://www.sdn.sap.comhttp://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/c0e74673-718f-2910-c4a7-bbae959d1e5a">How to Integrate SAP xMII Services with Web Dynpro Java</a>

Thanks & Regards,

Dipankar

[Former Member]

Hi Dipankar,

This document is really good. You almost made EP look to xMII. But the only thing is, it some how increases the programming time i think. Still this is a excellent experiment.

Thanks,

Rajesh.