ABAP Freak Show: February 4, 2009
In this episode of the ABAP Freak Show we look at the new Drag and Drop features of Web Dynpro ABAP in NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Package 1. We will look at three different forms of Drag and Drop capabilities in Web Dynpro ABAP. First we will see the ability to drag columns to rearrange their order in all tables. Next we will see how you can use Drag and Drop to reorder and reposition UI elements within the page. Finally we will see the traditional use case for Drag and Drop. We will drag and drop items from an image into a shopping cart and also from a table row into a image.
The source code for today’s example can be downloaded as part of the 2008 SDN Mentors’ Community Day Workshop. All the code in Transport, SAPlink, or PDF document format can be downloaded from here: http://code.google.com/p/sdn-mentor-handson-2008/downloads/list
Tune in on February 18th for the first show hosted by fellow Enterprise Geek, Rich Heilman. He will be demonstrating how you can consume ABAP Web Services from Business Objects Xcelsius.
Nice examples Thomas. Liked seeing you use NW Business Client as well.
Cheers
Graham Robbo
Hey Thomas, this is good stuff. I really enjoyed it as always. Did SAP leverage any existing AJAX libraries for this stuff or did they home grow their own?
Its all home grown libraries. Besides the legal complexities of including an existing library into Web Dynpro, the real challenge would have come when the library needed to be adapted to work in the Unified Renderer. The work required to adapt such a library was just more than what it would take to write something from scratch that would be designed to work with the rest of the SAP framework – including our delta handling.
@thomas_jung: Any chance they will make the same underlying libraries available for use with BSPs?
I’m not sure about the drag and drop specifically, but a lot of things are being shared between BSP/CRMUI and Web Dynpro. Since BSP was originally built upon an early version of the Unified Rendering library that Web Dynpro is based on, it does make it possible to share developments between the two environments. Because of internal changes in the development team structures, BSP/CRMUI and Web Dynpro ABAP are now better able to share developments with each other. I can’t talk about specifics just yet, but I think there are some nice things coming in the near future.