Conversion of ALV reports to WebDynpro applications

[Former Member]

Is there any documentation on this topic? I have a customer who uses a lot of ALV reports and are concerned about migration or conversion of all these reports. They like to know what SAP's plans are in helping customers who are in the same situation. They use hundreds of variants for some of these reports and are trying to get an idea on what is involved for planning purposes.

[Former Member]

Hello Ravi,

Thanks for your reply. The customer plans to migrate to WAS 6.40. They do not use Portal or ITS as far as I know. They would like to use WebDynpro for this. Some standard SAP transactions they quoted are VT03, VT01, MV04 etc. They have custom transactions similar to these. One of their concerns is, for each of these reports, they have many variants. If they separate the presentation logic from the processing, and create UI, is there a feature that allows them to create different variants also? Do they use Web Dynpro for ABAP or Web Dynpro for Java to accomplish this?

Thanks,

Prameela

[Former Member]

Hi

If you are using WebDynpro for Java then the presentation logic would be in java and the backend would be RFC programs in ABAP. WebDynpro interacts with R/3 using RFC/BAPI.

In WebDynpro for java it is not possible to use the variants in SAP R/3 for the report. Will have to see if there is any RFC that would retrieve any Variants available for a Report program based on User and also possibility of retreiving the values inside a particular variant. As far as i can see this will not work in WebDynpro for java

Maybe it is possible in WebDynpro for ABAP. I dont have an idea about that.But i see that as a better option in your case.

Hope that helps you.

regards

ravi

[thomas_jung]

My question is - what is the driving reason to convert. There is no technical reason why the reports just can't stay the way they are in the SAPGui ALV grid. From what I have seen nothing in WebDynpro ABAP or Java (or BSP/JSP) comes close to the complete functionality of the ALV Grid. These tools are still relatively immature compared to the SAPGui ALV grid.

Right now the only way I have seen to have anywhere near the same functionality as the SAPGui ALV grid is the ITS. No - you absolutely do not need enterprise portal to do this. The WebAS 640 has an integrated ITS built into. Using this webgui, transactions are automatically converted to HTML without any advance development. However performance of this transactions are not as good as the their SAPGui conterpart. On the other hand the ITS has seen some nice improvements in performance over the years (especially since the integration into the WebAS).

[Former Member]

I will check with the customer and let you know.

[Former Member]

Hello Ravi,

Customer has the following concern:

"How stable/robust is this ITS on 6.40? Did any of your customers who migrated to mySAP last year use this feature for their custom report/transactions

or did they choose to rebuild the UI on webdynpro?"

Do you know if integrated ITS is the preferred way to go for SAP customers using custom ALV reports?

Thanks, Prameela

[thomas_jung]

To me you have to consider the cost to benefit situation. You will spend a lot of time and money rewritting the UI of already working transactions into WebDynpro. In the end you will have transactions with less functionality and worse performance than you had in the SAPGui for Windows with the ALV Grid. What did that really buy you?

On the other hand if you just want to get transactions to the web, the ITS allows this without any development. The transactions will look and feel just like today and will have very nearly all the same functionality as the SAPGui ones.

Now is the 640 stable/robust? It must be - SAP released it didn't they? I can tell you from our experience that yes it does seem stable. It is built upon the mature external ITS and the ICM. As far as robust - it has been for us, but we haven't had thousands of simultanious users on it yet. Memory consumption might be a concern if you use multiple languages and you are already tight on your total shared memory area. If you are on a 64-bit platform this isn't as much of a concern because you are only constrained by hardware limitations (how much memory can you squeeze into the box).

[Former Member]

Thanks to all who helped me in answering my questions.

[Former Member]

Hi,

My 2 cents here. I have come across applications which have been converted from SAP GUI based to Web based using ITS and have been incredibly slow and users started going back to SAP GUI, than to use ITS.

WebDynpro is looked upon as an alternative to ITS.

Regards,

Subramanian V.

[Former Member]

Hi

Are you planning to migrate an ALV report directly to a Webdynpro app. Is that your question.

Well if you want to move your ALV reports to WebDynpro then u will have to create the layout again in WebDynpro and also ensure that the data to be displayed will be returned by an RFC. Webdynpro will interact with R/3 using BAPI's/RFC's.

Well at the same time if you want to display the ALV reports directly without making changes then you could make use of a Internet Service in transaction SE80.

This feature requires Portal.

Make that as a IAC iview. Then you can directly bring the ALV reports in the Portal.

But this technique uses ITS and it may be time consuming too especially if your customers are using ALV for their reports 90% of their time.

Anyway these are the possible solutions available. If you could elaborate on what kind of migration you are looking at then maybe we could provide some more suggestions.

Hope that helps. let me know if u require any further clarifications.

regards

ravi