2010-10-20

Developing Mobile Applications for SAP

I skipped breakfast this morning at SAP TechEd 2010 to get to this hands-on lab (CD162) 40 minutes early. The hope was to get a no-show spot left by one of the approximately 50 registered attendees. One other person still beat me to the door. Right now, I'm second on the waiting list.





I made it!  Good lab too; it was worth the wait.  The important take-aways of this course were (1) learning how to use a set of SDOE_* transactions that are used to design the data structures and rules that are exported and consumed by the mobile application development environment; and (2) understanding how to consume the the published XML data structures in an application developed in Visual Studio C#.


Creating Distribution Rules
Transaction SDOE_WB is available in SAP Netweaver Mobile 7.1.  It is the Workbench used to create your distribution rules for mobile devices.  Here you indicate the data structures and configure rules used to determine what instances of those data structures are passed on to the mobile devices.


Developing on the SAP/Sybase Co-Innovation Stack 
After designing the data model to be consumed by the mobile application, you will need to export the model as an ESDMA bundle.  This is used by the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) to generate code in C# or Java (possibly others).  The generated code handles passing data and messages between the mobile device local database and the SAP backend database.  This allows you, the developer, to focus on the mobile application's business logic and design.

Looking forward to my first project.

UPDATE: I've since learned that there is many different ways (released and unreleased) to do mobile development.  Most of which are complicated at best.  The post above is just one small piece of one way to get a mobile application up and running.

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