Custom Task Providers for the SAP NW GW Task Gateway : who's doing it ?

[Former Member]

There is a single post available today explaining what is involved in writing a custom task provider for the Task Gateway.

I was wondering whether there are already people who have tried to implement such a custom provider. A quick search through the SAP Store learns that at least within the SAP partner eco-system, there has so far been 0 attempts to create a commercial task provider implementation for the Task Gateway.

As we are currently considering such an implementation for a non-SAP workflow system, it would be great to hear from others about their experiences.

There is another confusing piece in the SAP Help Portal regarding custom task providers. It is a section in the documentation not for the Task Gateway, BUT the Workflow Services. Up until SAP NW Gateway SP06, there was this chapter, entitled "Task Provider Framework Capabilities", which appears to provide yet another set of APIs to build a custom task provider, with the added capability so it seems to also support push notificatoins. This raises the question : is this API no longer supported in later versions of the gateway and how does this framework relate to the Task Gateway APIs available to build a custom task provider.

Tags edited by: Jitendra Kansal (Moderator)

[Former Member]

Hi Theo,

Have you can implement a custom task provider which would make connections to third party systems to fetch the required data?.

Right now we have one requirement, where we need to implement Fiori My Inbox for 'SAP Sourcing & CLM' Contract Approvals. This product(Sourcing & CLM) is running in Java-stack.

We have provided some web-services to expose the data to outside system to consume/use it.

we are using one SAP system where it has all the required components for implementing Fiori Inbox are available in single system. That means there is no separate Hub system & no RFC calls.

I followed the Article which you mentioned earlier. But i am not able to proceed with some of the steps in that document.

1).Created one consumer proxy service by using WSDL(Sourcing & CLM).

2).Created one Custom task provider class by extending an abstract class.

3).Implemented the code for the Query_tasks & read_tasks by calling the consumer proxy service (step-1) and returned the export parameters respectively.
4). I was able  test the methods individually and see the results data.

I also followed & implemented the remaining steps mentioned in the article. but i am not sure where it went wrong.

In article, end of step-3 they were talking about 'Assign Data Provider to Data model', so are those predefined class(Data/Model) or we need to create our self?. If we need to create then how we can?.

Please help on implementing custom task provider  with detailed steps.

Note : New to ABAP development and i have good experience in JAVA.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
-Kondal

[former_member191660]

Hi Theo,

your post doesnt seem to be very old. But you may have made your experiences in the meantime. If so, I'd be interested to hear.

BTW, the TaskGateway Service v2 is now also being used for the Fiory My Inbox App, which aims at replacing both Unified Inbox and Request Approvals ()

As to your original question: I havent implemented a Custom Provider for TaskGateway yet, but I did implement some Connectors for the UWL, which is a comparable task.

• One of the challenges already has been mentioned by Krishna: Authentication and SSO
  • You need one authentication mechanism to fetch the data from the third party system (server-to-server), this can also be done using a technical user or an SSO scenario
  • You also need a second authentication mechanism to call an Action UI by means of a URL (browser level SSO), which may for example be SAML2
• Another Challenge may occur if your third party system has a "different concept of things"
  • A Task is the main object in an inbox, and I can't make up a different concept of tasks at the moment, to be honest
  • but I have seen other concepts of substitution for example, which dont quite match the concept used by SAP in BW or BPM.
  • In such a case it may get tricky matching the two concepts

Cheers,

Sergei

[kammaje_cis]

Theo,

Here is my understanding, though I may not be answering your question.

Task Gateway is aimed at Unified Inbox. It has a predefined metadata, but for fetching the items for action, you can implement a custom task provider which would make connections to third party systems to fetch the required data. Challenging work I can think off in this scenario would be authentication. You might have to configure http type RFC destinations to handle certificates, https etc. ABAP already has a good REST library, so consuming external REST services should not be tough. Execution of actions would require a custom UI, for which URI need to be provided to the Unified Inbox.

This service (/IWPGW/TASKPROCESSING) is also used by Fiori "Approve Requests" app, though this Fiori app depends on ABAP Workflow implementation.

In summary, if you want to implement a custom task provider implementation, third party workflow engines would have to provide a REST service as well as URI approachable UIs. Also this only support BEP on Backend (most common and recommended) deployment scenario.

"Workflow Services" (/IWWRK/WFSERVICE) is an older implementation compared to above, not aimed at any specific UI, works only with ABAP workflow and also supports other Gateway deployment scenario. ((/IWWRK/WFHUBSERVICE for BEP on HUB as well).

Regards

Krishna

[Former Member]

Hi Krishna,

Thanks for your reply.

I think indeed your take on Workflow Services vs Task Gateway is correct : Workflow Services is SAP Workflow only, Task Gateway introduces a more general concept of task provider with 2 implementations out of the box (SAP Workflow and SAP NW BPM) as well as an open API for implementing a custom task provider.

There are indeed 2 versions of Task Gateway available today : to my knowledge version 1 was built to support the generic "Approve Request" SAP Fiori app, while version 2 indeed services the new Unified Inbox UI. Initially there were clear differences in functionality between these two, but what I see happening is that with every SP stack upgrade they are converging and the difference in functionality is getting smaller. I think btw one can leverage both versions of the service side-by-side.

@Andrew : thanks also for your reply. Indeed : I think a custom task provider could be used to bring in data from both SAP and non-SAP work item providers. The difference between your use case and ours is exactly that.

Btw : we also have plans to extend the reach of Task Gateway to non-SAP at a later stage once we have gained some initial experience with a custom task provider for another SAP system that does not use SAP Workflow nor NW BPM, i.e. where we cannot use the default providers that come with Task Gateway.

[former_member280283]

Hello Theo,

In case you are still interested in an answer to this question, we are planning to develop a custom task provider in NW AS Java in 2H 2015.

Do you have any plans to implement a custom task provider, and if so, on what platform?

--- Andrew

[Former Member]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your feedback.

I don't know if I understand you correctly : a custom task provider is the implementation in ABAP of a set of interfaces - actually, an implementation of an abstract class whose methods one has to implement - as described in the article I linked to in the first post.

So, if you implement one, you implement it on the SAP NW Gateway hosting the Task Gateway service.

I think the actual source for the task items can be either an ABAP system - e.g. in scenarios that don't use SAP Workflow or SAP NW BPM, two of the in-the-box providers available by default - or indeed it could be connecting to an external system with an open host API the provider can use to query and send commands (actions) to.

My initial post was intended to learn from others how difficult or how easy it would be to build such a custom provider and maybe also get some information about challenges, limitations or caveats involved in such an implementation.

We are indeed considering custom providers for some of our custom SAP processes which are not based on SAP workflow but for which we would still like to surface work items through the Task Gateway.

Cheers

Theo

[former_member280283]

Hello Theo,

In our case, we are implementing a custom task provider for a Java-based task manager, which means we have to implement both ends of this bridge (in Process Gateway and in our Java stack).

Coincidentally, I had a call with the architect of Process Gateway about 3 hours ago. The first thing we are doing is getting a list of the *required* services, presumably a subset of the long list from Resmi's

article. I hope to have that list next week.

--- Andrew