External Tool Integration with the xMII Workbench 12.x

[Former Member]

Is there any form of external tool integration, or API that supports building one (think something like a Eclipse plugin) ?

The editor for non-transaction based work (such as HTML, XSLT, etc.) should be considered unacceptable by all serious developers. Crashes, memory-leaks, lack of syntax-highlighting, etc.

While I'm aware that I can obviously code in another editor, and then copy&paste the code over every time I want to test something, this is a approach that's not only stupid and time-consuming, it's also very error phrone, and often causing loss of data.

A integration to Eclipse, either by a specialized API, or version-control integration with NDWI (if that even works, seems that nobody use it?), would make development much much less painful, and more efficient.

Even if this is completely impossible now, let this be a suggestion to the developers for much needed improvements, if this tool is to be taken serious by modern day developers. External version-control support is also a really big lack in the product. A home-made centralized VCS is hillariously inefficient. If the system had been build on standard-solutions such as SVN, atleast a Mercurial bridge could been done.

[former_member4529 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Like to add few points here :

1) NWDI is available for source control and version management since MII 12.1 release. It is the standard and stable component across all NW Java solutions and can be easily configured and used with MII with no hassle (my own experience). You can refer the following configuration guides for NWDI setup and use:

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/f0d998ba-2076-2d10-b3be-90909838e...

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/d0348c15-6ee6-2c10-f7a0-89c0fc209...

2) NWDS integration is not available in 12.2 release which is already at the end of ramp-up. I have heard from my friends in SAP MII product development that NWDS will be the de-facto editor for all SAP MII development in the future releases. The first phase of integration may come up in the immediate next release (12.3 or 13.0) which will get 100% completed in the release after that. I'll appreciate if anyone from the product development team can confirm this.

3) Definitely the web editor in MII workbench currently is pathetic for serious web developers and not anything more than a notepad. I remember in the Lighthammer (11.0/11.5) days there was a MS Frontpage plugin available for MII. I think that's not available or usable anymore. But with NWDS integration I hope this will be looked into as well.

4) WSDL interface of BLS though present from Lighthammer itself it was not matured and error-prone earlier. Since MII 12.1.4 it has been improved somewhat and now works fairly well.

My two cents

Thanks,

Dipankar

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Dipankar

Cheers for the heads up. To bad it'll probably be quite a while before NWDS 13 is ready, but at least it's the right design-direction.

As for SOAP / WebServices, xMII 12.1 have support for using SOAP services, and even have auto-discovery of methods and parameters. It don't allow binding of the SOAP url though, so dynamically service selection still have to be done by manually sending the soap envelope.

But it's fairly simple to manually create the envelope in XMII.

[Former Member]

Back to the core of this thread. I've been developing in MII / Illuminator since 2001. So I've always been used to using external IDE's for the web page development. For MII up to 11.5, I used dreamweaver typically and would save the files using mapped drive or FTP depending on the customer. Pretty standard stuff. However when 12.0 came, the ability to directly save the pages in that manner went away. Now for the most part I develop in Notepad ++ and copy / paste into workbench. Not really a great solution but I live with it. From my standpoint, MII's text editor in workbench isn't all that useful, but itu2019s better than nothing which is what we have in versions up till 12.0. It's a stop gap. I do find it handy when I have to make a quick change on a client machine that doesn't have an IDE.

Since there are tons of excellent IDE's out there, I think it would be far more beneficial for SAP to build a good way to upload files using ftp, or a drive share or something of that nature, instead of focusing efforts on building their own IDE. For one, why reinvent the wheel for the 100'th time. Second, no matter what IDE you develop, somebody is going to hate it.

Iu2019m probably always going prefer an external IDE for the same reasons that I don't use the query editor to develop long, complex queries. If I'm dealing with MS SQL, I'll use MSSQL Management Studio. Why? Itu2019s far more powerful than MII's query editor, and I don't expect MII's query editor ever have all those capabilities.

In short, why not allow developers an easier way to leverage the good IDE's out there, because thatu2019s what those of us who do this for a living are going to use anyway.

[Former Member]

Hi Claus,

I could not agree more with your topic!

I've been trying to create a better development structure for a client project using MII, but I feel like I'm back in the 90's...

We are having the exact same issues:

1. Version control: I've been looking into NWDI, but can't find much information about it and it seems that nobody uses it. So I'm still between giving it a try or just exporting files and saving versions on a local CVS or SVN server.

2. Writting code: nobody can possibly use the MII Workbench editor, even notepad++ is a lot better. We are also working with the cut/paste approach.

3. Using XML inputs: since MII is all XML based, this should be seamless, but I've tryed everything and still can't have a XML input in a transaction that will be called as a web service. I've seen people send strings with separators (reminds me of the 80's), adding the entire XML nodes encoded into one string input and all kinds of work arounds, but no real solution...

I am dreaming of a day when MII can be coded in a structured way. Right now all I see is people doing all kinds of scary stuff with this tool such as business logic in the web pages as java script, direct access to SQL Queries from the web pages (I can think of a lot of security issues here), the list goes on... I just dream of the days when I used to deal with java and 3-tier architectures.

NWDS is nothing but the Eclipse IDE customized by SAP. I hope that they just drop the entire workbench and create a real development environment with this NWDS.

Sorry for the rant, but I sincerely hope that SAP reads this and takes it as an input to further developments. Right now I just feel like we are using a Beta version of a development tool. Even though it is on version 12.1 and has been around for a while...

[Former Member]

I don't really have any issues with development in the workbench. For HTML/Javascript the editor + Mozzilla/Firebug have been fine for my needs. They could move the delete button away from right next to the test button

I have seen some scary stuff but I see this kind of stuff on every platform I have dealt with. In my opinion that has more to do with the quality and experience of who is doing the implementation and not any shortcomings in MII's architecture. web container, service buss, logic engine, and integration layer. What more does one needu2026 I guess it would be nice if they added json as an output type to the illuminator service.

FWIW I have passed xml data via the SOAP interface, though I avoid using SOAP as much as possible. You have to surround the xml with

<![CDATA[]]>

so the parser doesn't cry.

[Former Member]

>

> I have seen some scary stuff but I see this kind of stuff on every platform I have dealt with. In my opinion that has more to do with the quality and experience of who is doing the implementation and not any shortcomings in MII's architecture. web container, service buss, logic engine, and integration layer. What more does one needu2026 I guess it would be nice if they added json as an output type to the illuminator service. 

So in your opinion, version-control and proper development tools are overrated? You're not a developer, are you now?

>

> I don't really have any issues with development in the workbench. For HTML/Javascript the editor + Mozzilla/Firebug have been fine for my needs. They could move the delete button away from right next to the test button  

You taking the piss? How can a editor without monospaced font support, that attempts to use Java highlight for HTML, be "fine" ? How can you consider development without version-control for "fine". Do you also "deploy" by doing manual copy&paste from your development environment? Or worse, are you editing the production environment directly? (That appears to be common with xMII for some odd reason)

If you even hinting the slightest that you consider yourself productive in the xMII editor, then I'm rendered speechless. But I suppose you never had any real experience, doing real programming, with modern tools, if you would think such madness.

xMII goes against all modern principles of software-engineering. How anyone can think it's "fine", is beyond me.

>

so the parser doesn't cry. 

Don't get me started on the XML parser. The Illuminator uses a different XML parser than the Transaction Runner. Not only are both very old, and lacks support for XSLT 1.2, but the Transaction Runner also don't support normal well-formed XSLT.

Like this "awesome" way of writing

<br />

:

<br><xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[ ]]>

[Former Member]

First let me say that I only expressed my opinion. I think this sort of conversation is good for the platform and the community, but can we try to have a more "professional" tone?

So in your opinion, u2026.

I didn't comment on state of version control in MII.I haven't had the opportunity to work with the NWDI integration yet so I didn't think it would be fair to comment. Perhaps you could share exactly what you found lacking with NWDI.

You taking the piss?u2026

Sorry, the fonts haven't slowed me down, and I never really noticed whats getting colored. Here i guess we just have a difference of opinion. No need to make judgments about ones experience and or competency, Right?

Also I don't cut and paste anything into production, and if somebody is then to my earlier point, that is a person doing that not the platform.

If you even hinting the slightest thatu2026

Again we just have a difference of opinion. Sorry but I just don't miss eclipse for my front end work, I can close a div tag myself just fine, and the javascript api's I use just aren't that deep. If I needed to do jsp then ok the workbench sucks, but I haven't had the need.

[Former Member]

Christian, you are a class act. It's nice to see such passion all of you have for MII!

Kind Regards,

Diana Hoppe

Edited by: Diana Hoppe on Apr 7, 2011 10:30 AM

[Former Member]

FWIW I have passed xml data via the SOAP interface, though I avoid using SOAP as much as possible. You have to surround the xml with 
<![CDATA[]]>
so the parser doesn't cry.

Hi Christian,

why avoid SOAP with a tool that is intended to be an integration layer accross different systems? If you don't want to use SOAP, then how do you usually connect your MII application with any other manufacturing systems such as a MES or LIMS?

Please don't tell me that you use shared Database tables, because that would be going way back in time and I could list a number of security issues related to that.

I could set the XML input as a string and surround the request XML with CDATA[], but then the WSDL for your web service is going to have one input marked as string, with no reference to the actual XML structure that it is expecting... What WSDL file would you provide to the client applications that are going to consume your service?

Thanks for your inputs,

Marcelo

[Former Member]

Christian, you are a class act. It's nice to see such passion all of you have for MII!

Thank you Diana, the sentiment is mutual.

why avoid SOAP with a u2026

I prefer not to use SOAP, that doesn't mean I wont use it if thats the best option available.

You said you weren't able to pass xml into MII via SOAP and I told you how. You could just give them the xml format you expect. I don't think there is an xml input type for SOAP per se but depending on your version you can define a complex type using an xsd if they need a definition in the wsdl.

[Former Member]

Hi Christian,

here is my question about the XML input in a web service call:

There are more details in the thread.

Thanks,

Marcelo

[Former Member]

How can a editor without monospaced font support, that attempts to use Java highlight for HTML, be "fine" ?

Hi Claus,

I've found where to change the font in the workbench to make it monospaced.

It is not the greatest solution, since it changes the font everywhere in the workbench application, but at least the code in the editors will be correctly indented...

The path to change it is not the most intuitive either:

Help -> Settings

Change the font to Monospaced (there is only one option)

I suggest you also change the font size to 11, or your workbench will get very confusing...

Regards,

Marcelo

[Former Member]

Claus,

I think starting 12.2 one would be able to use the NWDS as well for content development, though I'll let some one from the product development team verify this statement.

Though I have had no experience on NWDS but I've heard its a powerful development environment.

Hope this helps and calms you down a bit :).

Thanks

Udayan

[Former Member]

>

> I think starting 12.2 one would be able to use the NWDS as well for content development, though I'll let some one from the product development team verify this statement.

It would be a step in the right direction. Why the xMII environment wasn't based on Eclipse in the first place seems rather strange. (Then again, looking at xMII 11.x, one might get a hint on why.)

But for 12.1 NWDS seems to be a seperate production, with no relation whatsoever to xMII.