Overview

Projects are "dynamic web app" eclipse projects.

In SAP based apps, the service does most of the conversion between SAP objects (proxy) and biz objects, as opposed to Hibernate based apps where the conversion is done by Hibernate in the dao classes.

App specific css and js go in css/app_layout.css and js/app_specific.js.

ApplicationResources.properties contains all the props specific to the app itself no matter what machine it runs on. Usually, all messages and displayable strings go here.

Apps are normally setup so that eclipse will be able to build the app (with your local machine specific props) and deploy it to your local server.

Eclipse Project Structure

The following tree documents the Eclipse standard project structure.  Each section contains detail information on the specific project component. 

Checking Out an Eclipse Project

See the iJAG FAQ for instructions on checking out an Eclipse project.

Message Handling 

Message handling is configured in the Spring configuration for service objects.  See edu.mit.appname.service for information on how to configure default message handling and override message content.

Building and Running an Application in Eclipse

If you forget to create your site dir and configure it, your app will not build. This is a common problem. See iJAG FAQ on checking out an Eclipse project for instructions on setting up your site dir and configuring it.

To run your app, just right click the project and select Run As > Run on Server. The first time you do this it will ask you to pick which server to run on. If you check the checkbox at the bottom it won't ask you this again. By default, it will go to the action EntryAction.do. If project(s) other than the one you've chosen to run are run also, it is because they were added to your server earlier. You can remove them from the server by going to the Servers window, expanding the Oracle server, selecting the project you wish to remove, right clicking and selecting Remove.

You can access your app in your web browser at http://localhost:8888/apps/yourappnamehere/ and it will automatically go to EntryAction. If you have more than one entry point you will need to specify which action to go to. For SAP apps, you do not need to specify sapSystemId as this is configured in your site/ApplicationLocal.properties file (the r3default property). If you want to access your localhost from a different IP address, you will need to know the name. You can get this info by bringing up the Command Prompt and ping localhost. The response will be something like Pinging fss-115-2.mit.edu ... fss-115-2.mit.edu should replace loaclhost in the URL above.

When you rebuild your app, you can either do Run As again or you can right click your server and select Publish.

To debug your app, make sure you have some breakpoints set and then cause a rebuild to happen (you can do this by doing a Clean). Then restart your server in Debug mode. You can then either right click the project and select Debug As > Debug on Server, or publish the app and just go to your browser. When you reach a breakpoint, eclipse should switch to debug view and your browser will sit there waiting.

Demo Application

The skeleton we use to create new apps comes with a built-in demo app. You should base your code on this. The source for the demo is in the edu.mit.oasskeleton package structure, and there are a couple jsps and struts configs, etc. It also implements a search help.

Search Help

The documentation for implementing search help is in the search help tag library (searchhelp.tld) coming out of our skeleton (see Demo Application above). The ABAP developer should modify the generic SAP RFC adding code for the specific search help that is needed. This RFC, Z_CA_SEARCH_HELP, is expecting a key where the first two or three characters represent the business area (EHS, FI, HR, MM). MM stands for Materials Management and is covered by the Logistics team.

Revision History

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