To my surprise, I recently received an email that one of sessions I did at Teched was last year was going to be featured on SCN. I didn’t even recall that they had recorded it. MOB203 – Enable Data For Mobile Consumption was the session, and if I recall correctly the session went well (at least in my mind). Anyway, I was coerced to write a blog revisiting the subject and update everyone on where things stand today in regards to enabling data for mobile consumption. So here goes…
MOB203 focused on three things: Integration Gateway, Delta Query Support for OData, and getting real time business event notifications by integrating Push Notification support into your business systems. So it makes to tackle these one at a time.
Integration Gateway (IGW) – this is a component of the SAP Mobile Platform 3.0. You might have heard that SAP is a huge supporter of OData and that much of our Mobile Platform SDK as well as Mobile Platform both on-Premise and Cloud (HCPms) requires it’s use (think offline odata). So it is extremely critical we have a component that is able to translate other service formats (SOAP, Simple REST, JDBC) into OData and make it as simple as possible for our customers. When I did this session last year, IGW only supported SOAP (with many constraints), JDBC, JPA (which no one used), and ODC (backend SAP OData Services). Since then, we now support exposing Simple REST services and many of the constraints have been lifted on SOAP services (though some remain). Much of the new functionality requires scripting which can be done in JavaScript or Groovy…you can pick. We do have graphical mapping tools but these can only do so much, with some things you just gotta get you hands dirty and do some coding/scripting. Anyway, a lot is still being done in this area. Things are moving to the cloud and this IGW functionality should be showing up there soon. You can find lots of blogs, and how to guides on this IGW subject here.
Implementing Delta Query Support in SAP Gateway OData – this was the name of the section in MOB203. The scope has widened quite a bit. Not all OData comes from SAP Gateway, we need to understand how to enable this from an OData backend. First some back ground, OData delta queries allow you to query an OData service with a timestamp, the OData service should then use that timestamp to query for all new entities, changed entities and deleted entities. This functionality is key for Offline OData that is possible with HCPms and SMP3. You can imagine when you offline data onto a device that when your refresh that data you don’t want to have to query the entry result set…you want to be able to get the changes/deltas. To get the best offline performance supporting delta queries is key. We have many how to guides on this subject. My colleague Kenichi Unnai did a great webinar on how to get the best performance out of Offline OData. You can watch his webinar here. You can also find how to guides, blogs and more on the Integration are of our Mobility Enablement page on SCN.
So that leaves us now with Push Notification support and tying that in with business events on your backend. To me this is the apex of mobility…push notifications enable so much efficiency…their use is so wide spread from chats, to games, to now business applications. If you can inform your employees of important events the instant they happen, you can imagine that this can drive a lot of efficiencies and at the same time get your users actually using your app. Not too much has changed with how this is done since I did the presentation. That said, I would like to see more companies implementing this feature, it will surely be cost effective to do so. You can find a how to guide written by my colleague Jin Shin that takes you through the process of setting it all up and triggering the push notification from an SAP Gateway system.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the MOB203 revisited session:
If you have any questions please let me know!
