Bits and Pieces

Updated SAPBridge Web Services for the SAP OBA Sample Application 2.0

2009-12-23T10:37:06Z

The moment you start going through the 43 page OBA SAP SAK 2.0 installation document you will realize that once you come to the end which is installing the ADF components for Sharepoint Server 2007 BDC web parts, it doesn’t work. When you try to put a BDC web part for the ADF’s, you get an error which states that something has happened and look for the log file. I was wondering what happened and which log file? So I decided to take this off my demo that I was preparing for a major event next day as it was very late night. I went back home and started to dig what the issue was about and it turned out to be that the SAPBridge web services were a bit outdated. The webservices are quite improved with the new versions of SAP Netweaver (the version I am using is 7.0) hence the code needs to be updated. While the old versions of SAP had a multitude of webservices, which is 3 different in the original SAP SAK code, the new versions had a few with updated namespaces, method names and URLs. The schemas and method signatures is not drastically different, but needs a bit of a modification.

I dropped all web service definitions and created two instead for the following:

Z_FLIGHTCUSTOMER_WS : http://<SAP Host Name>:8000/sap/bc/srt/rfc/sap/Z_FLIGHTCUSTOMER_WS?sap-client=000
Z_FLIGHT_WS : http://<SAP Host Name>:8000/sap/bc/srt/rfc/sap/Z_FLIGHT_WS?sap-client=000

Wait, read the rest, although this is a simple ad web reference or add service reference exercise it doesn’t work as expected:

First and foremost, instead of directing the wizard to the above url, you should get the wsdl and copy it to a local text file. Then you need to do a Ctrl+H (find and replace) job. Do the following

Replace	With
parameters	parameter
System	SYSTEM

Save the files with a WSDL extension are you’re all set. Point your browser to the file and generate the proxies, don’t forget to change the URL in the web.config pointing to your SAP Server.

Second, once you create your proxies and try connecting to SAP you might get the error “Virtual Interface not found” (I got this with the FLIGHTCUSTOMER web service but other one was working) You keep on wondering what virtualization and what interface, it turns out to be that this related with the SAP side. You can follow the below steps to resolve the issue or ask you SAP administrator for help.

Symptom: The attempted use of an SAP BW query returns a virtual interface not found error: Error 32010: Cannot execute query. No result returned or XML returned in the result contains an error. Virtual Interface not found.

The reason is that the virtual interface … is not activated or needs to be reactivated.

Log on to SAP, go to the Object Navigator (Transaction SE80), and click on the Edit Object button.
On the Enterprise Services tab, select the Virtual Interface radio button and enter the name of the virtual interface.
Click on the Continue icon.
In the next screen, click on the Activate button. The Virtual Interface is activated.

Last but not least, if you’re using Add Service Reference and decide using WCF instead of asmx, you should change the binding at the client side after creating the proxy, it doesn’t work with the standard bindings the custom binding that worked for me is below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<system.serviceModel>

<textMessageEncoding maxReadPoolSize="64" maxWritePoolSize="16"

messageVersion="Soap11" writeEncoding="utf-8">

<readerQuotas maxDepth="10000000" maxStringContentLength="10000000"

maxArrayLength="67108864" maxBytesPerRead="65536" maxNameTableCharCount="100000" />

</textMessageEncoding>

<httpTransport authenticationScheme="Basic" bypassProxyOnLocal="false"

hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" keepAliveEnabled="false"

proxyAuthenticationScheme="Basic" realm="NSP" useDefaultWebProxy="true" maxReceivedMessageSize="653630" />

</binding>

</customBinding>

</bindings>

<endpoint address="http://<SAP Host Name>:8000/sap/bc/srt/rfc/sap/Z_FLIGHT_WS?sap-client=000"

binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="Z_Flight_WSSoapBinding"

contract="ServiceReference1.Z_Flight_WS" name="Z_Flight_WSSoapBinding" />

</client>

</system.serviceModel>

</configuration>

I have posted the updated version of SAPBridge web services to the following location http://sapbridge.codeplex.com

Happy Integration projects with SAP.

Announcing : Arabic Silverlight Web Slice Templates

2009-04-19T16:33:17Z

We recently started a project under the link http://arslie8ws.codeplex.com for Silverlight 2.0 based Arabic Internet Explorer 8 Web Slices. These slices could be downloaded and modified to fit the needs of Arabic websites. The initial set of web slices include a News Slice that reads from RSS feeds of newspapers, Stock Data Slice that reads information from a stock feed an provides graphical information and a Airline Reservation Slice.

We are planning to customize the slices for local sites and put the code here for immediate consumption.

Special thanks to Emad Abdelaziz our Silverlight MVP for putting these samples together.

Internet Explorer 8 Features Could Stickiness to Your Website in Minutes – Part 3 Web Slices, Ideas for Saudi Sites?

2009-04-13T22:13:17Z

Add a Web Slice and you won't have to go back to the same website again and again for updates on news, stock quotes, online auctions, weather, or even sports scores—now those updates will come to you. The new Web Slice feature provides up-to-the-minute information on the sites (it will alert you of new content by changing color or going bold) you care about most in one convenient place on the new Favorites bar.

WebSlices have four main behaviors.

Discovery : users discover webslices in the page and subscribe to it, adding it to the Favorites bar.
Update : IE8 uses the feed download engine to check for the updates.
Notify : When WebSlice content is changes it is bolded on the Favorites bar.
Display : The information displayed on the dropdown area when user clicks the WebSlice on the favorites bar.

I will start with a sample showing how to implement these behaviors.

Discovery

First you need an html page and a DIV tag within the page that will be used a “WebSlice Aware” area.

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="useless" class="hslice">
        <p><span class="entry-title">Useless WebSlice</span></p>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

id=”useless” : ID for the webslice, should be unique within the page, the ID for this webslice is set to “useless” and it could be set to any value.
class=”hslice” : defines this div to be webslice aware.
class=”entry-title” : this entry maps to the WebSlice button text on the favorites bar.

It will be rendered in the page as follows

Hover the mouse over the text and you’ll see the green webslice button

Click the button and dismiss the warning message box, the webslice will be on the favorites bar

Note that nothing happens when you click it as we didn’t define the content yet

Update

When changes occur in the WebSlice data, IE8 automatically updates.

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="useless" class="hslice">
        <p><span class="entry-title">Less Useless WebSlice</span></p>
        <div class="ttl" style="display:none;">15</div>
        <abbr class="endtime" title="2008-04-29T17:50:00-08:00"></abbr>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

The following tags are used to control the update behavior.

class=”ttl” : check for updates every 15 minutes
class=”endtime” : the content for webslice will expire at this time, i.e if you’re checking the availability of a flight, it doesn’t make sense to check after the flight has taken off

We’ll show how it works with a full webslice at the end of this article

Notify

The WebSlice gleams when new data is present

Display

We did all of this to display information to the user, the reason why we did all of the plumbing until now. We have 3 models to display data and depending on the need and information that needs to be displayed, you can do the implementation using pure html. Content is displayed in a small area which drops down when you click the WebSlice in the Favorites bar.

For security reasons, the Web Slice preview does not allow script or Microsoft ActiveX controls. Consequently, HTML forms and buttons are not supported. Instead, you can use links that contain URL parameters to perform related actions. Navigations occur within the currently selected tab. To get around this limitation, consider using an alternative display source, described below.

See Internet Explorer 8 Web Slice Guide for how to design, format and style Web Slices.

Basic

The selected “WebSlice Aware Area (div with class=”hslice”)” in the page is used the define and display the content.

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="useless" class="hslice">
        <div class="entry-content">
            <p><span class="entry-title">Less Useless WebSlice with Useless Content</span></p>
            <img src="images/sunny.png" id="image" style="padding:5px;float:left;" alt="Sunny" height="128" width="128" />
            <div class="entry-title" style="font-size:2.5em;margin-top:24px;font-weight:bold;">70° F</div>
            <p class="entry-title" style="font-weight:bold;font-size:1.5em">Sunny</p>
            <p><i>All fictional, of course!</i></p>
            <p>Current conditions as of 4:56 PM</p>
        </div>
        <div class="ttl" style="display:none;">15</div>
        <abbr class="endtime" title="2008-04-29T17:50:00-08:00"></abbr>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

class=”entry-content” defines the are that will be displayed in the dropdown area.

This is what is rendered.

And this is the content for the WebSlice. Observe that since I didn’t do proper styling and formatting on the WebSlice, it is wide. One thing worth noting is look at the small red circle at the bottom, this indicates that the webslice has expired. Why? (Hint: Check the class=”endtime” at the Notify section above)

Not so interesting? Or simple and serves your needs? Still we didn’t write any single piece of script, code or didn’t use any plugin. It is all html, attributes and elements. If this is all you need, you’re done with your first slice, put it in your web site and enjoy the extra traffic and usage.

Alternative Update Source

You are trying to build a WebSlice where static data is not enough. You want to display the data you get from an RSS feed. Like a simple Tadawul Webslice taht shows the stock market information or a WebSlice for AlRiyadh or AlWatan Newspapers showing the latest news, or your are fan of AlHilal Football Club and want to get the latest information about a match. You can create a webslice and assign the source of the slice to an RSS feed. You have a page to display the WebSlice aware area for discovery, update and notify settings which is named as Basic.html. Second you need the content through an RSS feed.

This is how the Basic.html looks like, click the Green Icon to subscribe

WebSlice “Gleams” on the favorites bar

This is the resulting web slice display, again it doesn’t look nice because of the formatting and lack of style

This is how the code looks like

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
    <h2>AlRiyadh Newspaper</h2>
    <div id="weather" class="hslice">
        <h3><span class="entry-title">Riyadh</span>, Breaking News</h3>
        <div class="entry-content">
            <a rel="feedurl" href=http://localhost/WebSlice/Sample.xml></a>
        </div>
</body>
</html>

This is how the Sample.xml looks like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" >
<channel>
<title>جريدة الرياض : تقنية المعلومات</title>
<link>http://www.alriyadh.com/</link>
<description>جريدة يومية تصدر عن مؤسسة اليمامة الصحفية</description>
<language>ar</language>
- <image>
<title>Riyadh Newspaper</title>
<url>http://www.alriyadh.com/img/logo.gif</url>
<link>http://www.alriyadh.com/</link>
</image>
- <item>
<link>http://www.alriyadh.com/2009/03/10/article414830.html</link>
<title>الأمير جلوي يفتتح الملتقى الرابع للخدمات الإلكترونية بالمنطقة الشرقية أكثر من (1000) مشارك يمثلون (60) جهة علمية وفنية وهندسية متخصصة</title>
<description>
    <div id="AlRiyadhNews" class="hslice">
    <div class="entry-content">
    <img src="http://www.alriyadh.com/img_s/02/02cf8fa515b6ba079a1477129af05ef9_w210_h160.jpg" id="image"/>
    <p><i>أكد صاحب السمو الأمير جلوي بن عبدالعزيز بن مساعد نائب أمير المنطقة الشرقية أن العمل جار لايجاد بوابة الكترونية موحدة للمنطقة الشرقية</i></p>
    </div>
    </div>
</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Alternative Display Source

When user clicks the Web Slice on the Favorites bar, a flyout appears with the stored value of entry-content property which links to a different page which can host content including ActiveX and scripts. My favorite is Silverlight, where you can display appealing content. Download and test the new MSN Toolbar on http://www.newmsntoolbar.com/ which uses Web Slices built on Silverlight technology.

The code for Basic.html is very very simple

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
    <h2>AlRiyadh Newspaper</h2>
    <div id="weather" class="hslice">
        <h3><span class="entry-title">Riyadh</span>, Breaking News</h3>
        <a rel="entry-content" href="http://www.level70.de/silverlight/mcpluscsXS/Default.html"></a>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

the href for content in this case links to a sample site for Silverlight displaying content. The WebSlice wil open a flyout and show the sample content which could be any Silverlight control which opens up unlimited opportunities. The sample content is displayed as:

Hint: Follow the link on the address bar for the RIA WebSlice article.

Some ideas based on MSN Toolbar:

Displaying Tadawul Data

Newspapers

Sports

We are creating Fully Arabic Silverlight based sample Web Slices and will put them on Codeplex. Please follow the announcements in my blog for the location of the slices.

To get more information on the IE8 Features in general I recommend the MSDN Article New Features To Slice, Store, And Accelerate Your Web Applications.

See Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit

See Internet Explorer 8 Team Blog

Internet Explorer 8 Features Could Stickiness to Your Website in Minutes – Part 2 Accelerators, Adventures with Tadawul Site?

2009-04-12T15:53:11Z

Building an accelerator is a simple task. Number one site that comes to mind in Saudi Arabia is obviously the Tadawul, which is the Saudi Stock Market and I decided to build an accelerator that searches the stock information in this site. The only challenge here was the only way to search in the site was based on Stock Symbol which is a numeric value. Searching with Stock Symbol may not seem intuitive but this is a limitation from the site itself, you can invoke any service through GET or POST.

1) Create an XML document using the OpenService Format Specification for Accelerators. Here I will only build the basic functionality but the specification is comprehensive in the features that could be implemented. Publish document to your website. I named it TadawulAccelerator.xml and put it under root.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
<homepageUrl>http://www.tadawul.com.sa</homepageUrl>
<display>
    <name>Search Stock Symbol in Tadawul</name>
    <icon>http://www.tadawul.com.sa/favicon.ico</icon>
</display>
<activity category="define">
    <activityAction context="selection">
       <preview method="get" action="http://www.tadawul.com.sa/wps/portal/!ut/p/.cmd/cs/.ce/7_0_A/.s/7_0_4A0/_s.7_0_A/7_0_4A0"/>
       <execute method="get" action="http://www.tadawul.com.sa/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_4BC?CompanySymbol=&ANN_ACTION=ANN_SEARCH&symbol={selection}&tabOrder=1"/>
    </activityAction>
</activity>
</openServiceDescription>

The XML is self explanatory.

display tags control what you see when you right click. One thing worth mentioning here is the favicon link. This doesn’t exist in the Tadawul site but I’m putting it here just for showing how it should be done.
activity tags define how to call the service.
preview section : An Accelerator can provide an optional HTML preview that is displayed when the user hovers over an Accelerator on the menu. Previews are useful to quickly obtain a map, in-place definition or translation, content ratings, or links to related content. In our case to demonstrate the functionality I’m displaying the ticker. Again this is a limitation of the site, if we provide a backend service that provides preview information we can easily call it here. As an example the Virtual Earth Accelerator displays a quick map during the preview mode. The preview window is limited to 320 width and 240 height on a 96 dots per inch (dpi) display. All content outside of the region is cut off. That’s why if you try the above accelerator some of the ticker is cutoff.
execute element specifies the main action triggered when the user invokes the Accelerator. Note the {selection} parameter, which means replace this token with the text the user selected in the page. There are different parameter types you can use.

2) Add a link or input to your web page and attach the following code.

<button onclick="window.external.AddService('TadawulAccelerator.xml')">Install Accelerator</button>

Sample web page I created looks like. Very simple page hence I didn’t give the code here.

3) When you click the Install Accelerator button, you get a warning message, click to install the accelerator.

4) Open any page, select an item. In our case it should be a numeric value that is a Stock Symbol. I’ve added two valid stock symbols which could be seen in the above page, 6010 or 6020.

As you see building an accelerator for Tadawul was very simple. It only took couple of hours including the learning. The only thing that needs to be considered is the backend services that are called by the accelerator. We can use GET or POST to call the service and pass the following variables.

To get more information on the IE8 Features in general I recommend the MSDN Article New Features To Slice, Store, And Accelerate Your Web Applications.

Also the following article gives a complete overview of accelerator development see OpenService Accelerators Developer Guide.

See Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit

See Internet Explorer 8 Team Blog

Internet Explorer 8 Features Could Stickiness to Your Website in Minutes – Part 1 Why Should I Do It?

2009-04-12T12:31:00Z

Internet Explorer 8 comes with a number of features that could help you with increasing the expected benefits from your website. Before starting the important things to keep mind is;

All IE8 features I will introduce are “technology independent”, you can use it on your ASP.NET, JSP, PHP, Phyton, Ruby on Rails website.
Implementing is “simple”, it doesn’t take more than a week.
They’re declarative, you create a simple XML document or add few html attributes and tags to your website.

What’s in it for you, why should you spend a week and put it on your website?

You build a website to

Deliver a service to the user, examples are airlines, stock market, healthcare, etc…
Sell yourself, an idea or product, examples are ecommerce, social, personal site, forums, photo sharing, etc…
Make revenue from advertisement, which is related with the above but you might build a site with a high hit rate and make money from advertisement, you have to have a high hit rate and low bounce rate

To achieve this you have to

Bring people to your site
Make people feel at home
Create new connections
Have people spend more time

In summary, your site should be sticky, people should register and continue using it.

I will walk you through two simple usage scenarios which should be familiar to anybody using the internet.

Checking Status of an Entity Continuously – You browse the Saudi Airlines site and search for a flight to Jeddah, obviously it is full, you want to check if the availability of the flight if it changes. You browse to your favorite eAuction site, check the final price of the item every 10 minutes. You browse Tadawul, register for the stocks you are interested or you own, you want follow-up the prices and want to take action.

How do you do this today from the browser? 1) Browse the site, 2) logon if needed, 3) enter the information and search for the entity, 4) analyze the information you’re interested within the page which has all other information you’re not interested and distracting user interface elements, 5) go back to work on another browser tab, 6) remember to check for the updates, 7) alt + tab, go back to the tab and realize that the session has expired, 8) logon again, 9) enter information and search again, 9+n) ….

Get Contextual Information from Another Site Based on Current Selection - For example, in an non-IE8 browser—Firefox or IE7-- just count the typical number of steps a user would take to map an address, translation, check for comments on the stock in Saudi Stocks or Hawamer: 1) Highlight the address, 2) right-click to copy the address, 3) Click to open a new tab or window, 3) Type in site address of the page (mapping service, stock market site, Arabic translation) 4) click enter to load the page or service, 5) click the field to enter the search information, 6) right-click to paste the address into the field, 6) click enter, 7) wait for the respective page to display results: 7 steps in all!

How does IE8 address these scenarios?

With IE8 accelerators

Highlight the information
Right-click on the page
Select the Tadawul Search option and you instantly see the preview of the location, without ever leaving the page or site you’re on.

With IE8 Web Slices

1. Go over WebSlice enabled area, click the green button to register for the webslice
2. The Web Slice will be added and provides up-to-the-minute information on the sites (it will alert you of new content by changing color or going bold) you care about most in one convenient place on the new Favorites bar.

In user tests, Accelerators and Web Slices saved users 10s of seconds performing common tasks like check on an eBay auction, finding products on Amazon.com, checking a weather report. For all the accelerators and web slices (with new ones being added every day) just go to http://ieaddons.com

In forthcoming parts of this blog, I will be explaining my adventures in building Accelerators and Web Slices for some of the well known local websites.

IE8 Beta 2 is Out, Get It

2008-08-30T13:42:47Z

From here.

Minimalist Architectures

2008-08-27T17:30:30Z

So what does this mean? I believe this is closely related with the definition of IT Architecture and how we architects are performing this art. When building a solution why do we need complex patterns? Why are those block diagrams so complex and big? Do we really need these boxes here and there? If you look from an artistic viewpoint painting a very simple drawing is risky for the artist. If you draw a 15m x 15m drawing on the wall of a building then people seeing it will appreciate the amount of labor and the difficulties on painting such a big thing.

However there are artists who draws couple of lines on the canvas and yet be much more famous. To me this is what differentiates an artist from a painter. There are so many painters around who can reproduce a Picasso or Rembrandt exactly however this doesn’t make them an artist.

I think now it should be clear to everyone where I’m coming from.

Any IT architect could take any patterns and apply them to the solution without thinking how and why it fits to the specific problem, which doesn’t make them an IT architect. If we take it one step further, building a very complex architecture and writing hundreds of pages of documentation explaining it also doesn’t make one a true architect. However it gives a good reason and justifies the paychecks given by the customer who sees the labor put into the solution.

I’m a great fan of minimalist architecture which is sort of an extension to the agile paradigm for the software development.

Why would a business owner in any customer want a complex solution which takes years to build and hard and expensive to operate? So there should be a good justification for complexity, otherwise it would have been done for the sake of giving something “with meat” to the customer and get a good payment.

Think of this scenario, as an architect you’ve been hired to build a solution and you go ahead and do technology validations and prototypes and find a specific solution to the customers problem which decreases the development time of the project from 2 years to 1 month. However you’ve spent 2 months for the idea and the only deliverable you give to this customer is a presentation explaining solution and a simple solution with a few lines of code.

What is the value to the customer? Enormous reduction in the time to market, simple application with reduced operational costs, productivity boosts in the development team. Who wouldn’t want this? I call this a minimalist architecture and to do this you have to be smart and innovative. You always have to ask yourself why does the customer this complex piece, what has the support team done to you to deserve this continuous torture.

Unfortunately as the architects, we don’t want. We are afraid that it will devalue our work. Show off with the simples projects you’ve done, brag about how simple the architecture you’ve put together for project X is how did it simplify the lives of the customer’s IT team. How did it solve specific business problem and how did it enable organization Y to gain market share against the competition.

In the following weeks I’ll try to give solid samples on how complex an architecture could be and how can it be refactored to a minimalist architecture. I’m still putting together the framework however what I have in mind is sort of a unit testing framework, we may call it ArchUnit, for ensuring that the proposed architecture delivers the requires functional and non-functional requirements and incrementally simplifying points of complexities to come up with a minimalist architecture.

I do keep in mind that certain things could not be simplified. If you’re sending a space shuttle to the moon, it can’t be simple, but still it can be “minimalized”. As a good example I want to finish with the famous US space pen project that cost millions of USD vs Russian’s using a simple pencil at the space. The original “business” requirement was the ability to take notes at the space however the techies turned it into “We have to use a pen” and and the problem became “how can we build a complex space pen which has pressurized air in it so that it can write in gravityless conditions”. A mouthful hah, go for the real need and try to solve it instead of building a solution architecture based on well known patterns and try to make it work your specific case.

Did you see the antipattern here? Deciding on an architectural pattern up front, then look for the requirements and tweaking the pre-selected architecture to fit the needs. It would be easier to listen to the requirements and select the architecture. In our case the selected architecture is “use a pen” and then work on the requirements of using it in space.

I’ve written this article before reading Roger Sessions book “Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises”. This book is fantastic in putting a framework around complexity and how to avoid it. Please read the book for a more scientific approach from a guru in the field. I’m really enjoying every single sentence in the book.

I will continue providing examples from my experience in the field as how we can think out of the box and provide minimalist architectures to simple need.

Stay tuned.

Now writing is part of my job

2007-12-10T10:08:00Z

It was a hard period. Running here to there delivering projects. However I do have experience accumulated and as the name implies bit and pieces that you have to dig in for days and you can't make the think work without them. Good news is I've changed my role within Microsoft and writing is part of my duties. I hope I'll be back soon. If you're integrating anything with anhother thing and they look completely different with nothing in common. You can search my blog for interesting integration stories or drop me an email and I'll try to do my best to give an answer.

Hope to see you soon with interesting stories.

At Last, I'm writing

2006-11-20T10:20:00Z

I'm working for Microsoft Services on the field as an Architect. I'm the "Do It" sort of person rather than "Tell It". Writing is always an overhead for me. When I think about the amount of code I can develop or the systems I can build within that same timeframe I usually skip this "Unnecessary" piece. Having the background of both Infrastructure and Development I provide unique solution to customers. I use the term Swiss Army Knife approach. Sometimes good sometimes bad, however I do beleive that without being aware of the deployment, hardware and operational issues, the software or solution desinged is never complete.

I will post information to my blog on the interesting issues I am faced with at the customers each and every day. From time to time I will put thoughts and "Bits and Pieces" on half baked ideas.