Developing portlets which access SAP R/3, using Bowstreet Portlet Factory and WebSphere Studio

Level: Intermediate

Sandro Schwedler (schwedle@de.ibm.com), IT Specialist, IBM Software Innovation Team, Germany

01 Sep 2004

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This two-part tutorial steps through developing a WebSphere® portlet application which uses data from a SAP R/3 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. You use the Bowstreet Portlet Factory and IBM® WebSphere® Studio Application Developer (or WebSphere Studio Integration Edition) to create two portlets.

In the first part of the tutorial, you set up the environment, test the connection to your SAP system, and create a simple application, which uses the Bowstreet Portlet Factory model and builders to access a SAP system. Then you add support for user credentials, using WebSphere Portal's Credential Vault, and run the application as a portlet in WebSphere Portal. The end result of part one is a portlet called EmployeeList which displays a list of employees for a given manager.

In Part 2, you create a second portlet, EmployeeDetails, which displays the personal details for a selected employee. You use WebSphere Portal's Click-to-Action (C2A) support to enable the EmployeeList portlet to "communicate" with the EmployeeDetails portlet. When the user (a manager, in this case) selects an employee and clicks an item on a C2A dynamically generated menu, WebSphere Portal transfers the employee id between the two portlets. The end result of this part is two portlets: a revised version of the EmployeeList portlet which is enabled to send data to the new second EmployeeDetails portlet.

This tutorial is intended for portlet and J2EE application developers who want to rapidly create applications which integrate with a SAP R/3 system.

In this tutorial

Upon completion of this tutorial, you should be able to:

1. Set up a connection between Bowstreet Portlet Factory running in WebSphere Studio and your SAP R/3 system.
2. Use the Bowstreet Portlet Factory to create portlets which retrieve data from aSAP R/3 system.
3. Add WebSphere Portal features, such as user credentials, managed by the Credential Vault, to your Bowstreet portlets.
4. Enable Click-To-Action (C2A) so that a source portlet can transfer data to a target portlet.
5. Integrate data and applications from a SAP R/3 system with WebSphere J2EE applications.

Prerequisites

You should have basic knowledge of J2EE application programming and portlet development. It is helpful, but not necessary, to complete the Bowstreet tutorials available in the Bowstreet help system. Because the Bowstreet Portlet Factory and WebSphere Studio tools generate most of the code for you, building this application requires only minimal Java skill.

System requirements

You will need the following software:

1. IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer or Integration Edition 5.0, or greater.
2. Bowstreet Portlet Factory 5.8.2, or greater.
3. IBM WebSphere Portal 5.0 Server Express, or greater.

Duration

3 hours

Formats

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