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Former Member

Introduction

In case you didn't find this document by reading Why not to use /nwbc to access NWBC? it's okay but you should still read it in order to understand why this document exists.

Creating a custom ICF External Alias

Go to transaction SICF, press F8 (Execute) on the selection screen. In the next screen press the External Aliases button.

Press F5 (Create) to create a new ICF External Alias.

Name the new ICF External Alias /znwbc and give a description. Now switch to the Trg Element tab.

Expand the hierarchical tree, set the focus on /sap/bc/nwbc and double click it to set it as the target element for the ICF External Alias. Here I would like to mention that if you want to use (or later change to) the SAP NetWeaver User Interface Services (e.g. UI2) version of NWBC, the correct path is /sap/bc/ui2/nwbc.

The new ICF External Alias is now pointing to the ICF NWBC service /sap/bc/nwbc (or /sap/bc/ui2/nwbc),

Configuring the custom ICF External Alias

Numerous configuration changes might be required, such as

  • Session Timeout
  • Load Balancing
  • Compression
  • Logon Procedures
  • Security
  • Error Pages including System Logon configuration (see below)

Whatever configuration is required, it is customer specific e.g. transportable from one system to another and SAP won't interfere with it. You are ready to start using the new ICF External Alias, just point your NWBC or browser to /znwbc and that's it (unless you want to configure it further).

Configuring System Logon

In case you are one of the lucky ones and you have Single Sign-On (SSO) in place for both NWBC for Desktop and NWBC for HTML you will probably want to skip this chapter. If you are not so lucky, here is the deal. By default the System Logon that users are presented with when authenticating to NWBC looks as follows (AS ABAP 7.31)

I don't know about you but I like my web applications a bit more modern. So let's do just that. In the configuration of the new custom ICF External Alias go to the Error Pages tab, select System Logon radio button and press Configuration.

This is what it looks like by default

Change the configuration as follows

If you want, you can configure the System Logon screen further by pressing the Adjust Links and Images button. Here is what your System Logon screen will look like

A definite improvement if you ask me. If you want, you can customize the SAP NetWeaver text (or logo), Logo and Copyright text by using the Adjust Links and Images button as mentioned before.

Conclusion

ICF nodes and External Aliases can be extensively configured and in some situations they have to be configured. That said it makes even more sense to have a custom ICF External Alias so that configurations can be done without affecting the default configuration provided by SAP.

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