Eclipse Grinding... Part 2

Okay, I've calmed down now...

If you ever actually manage to load the thing : Preferences->General->Startup/ShutDown you can choose which plugins get invoked. I switched ALL these off, and even though this included some SAP related Plugins, I was still able to do everything I needed to. This sped it all up!

Eclipse is grinding my gears. Random Rant post, no useful information! :)

It sucks. I try and find merit where I can, try and see the bright side, and this makes for a good life on the whole. However, I'm getting increasingly frustrated with SAP washing their hands of responsibility of maintaining a decent development environment.

Having followed various blogs on the web explaining how to allocate more memory to Eclipse, and switch off all the plugins, I'm still only successfully launching the application about half the time, and then frequently hanging when trying to do mundane tasks like opening a CDS view, or interrogating a package.

I just wish there was an alternative. The way they've Eclipse hooking into the GUI Logon pad to pick up server details for logons was a really neat trick. As a way of developing UI5 applications and then loading on to BSP works nicely...

It's just it'll be working okay for a bit then for some reason I can't quite discern, it'll not load, or load and not work. AAAARRRHRHHGHHHGHGH!!

Cloud WebIDE - Grunt

So I merrily built an application in WebIDE, and could test using the Application-Test function... but when trying to deploy, I get “Unable to find local grunt” and “npm ERR! code EINTERGITY” errors.

So the whole point of Grunt is to “minify” the code, which makes it more efficient for the computer / phone to use, simultaneously making the code horrific to read and maintain.

Reversing the “Add Grunt” steps (WebIDE was doing these automatically) in

https://developers.sap.com/uk/tutorials/webide-grunt-basic.html

by removing the Gruntfile.js and package.json files from the app 

means that deployment is done without minification, and deploys in like 2 seconds.

Cloud... really?

So I go to log on WebIDE this morning and get the following : 

Seriously, what am I meant to do about this? With on-prem, you've got a BASIS team that you can go and bother, a manager to bother if they're getting slow, and your PM / SDM can go and bang some heads together to get things done...

Now, I'm at the mercy of some behemoth organisation, who may or may not have my back in prioritising fixing this. 

One of the selling points of Cloud was that the infrastructure is handled by someone else, but it's hard to swallow that, when I get the above!

Which leads me to another thing... your business doesn't get a say in downtime. I guess with fail-overs etc, your cloud provider can do a good job of maintenance on one box, whilst you're being served by another, so you'd never have any downtime. In the case where this is unavoidable, the BASIS guys would talk to the Business and find an agreeable time to do it. With Cloud, the Business has no say? Doesn't sound that great!

Anyway, fortunately I've got some backend oData services to build, so I can wait for Cloud to be ready, but otherwise, I'm in the position of saying "Sorry Business, I can't work on it today" and there's nothing we can do about it!?

FIORI Security gotcha : Protocol cannot be switched to HTTPS: HTTPS is not configured / active

Working on a FIORI development recently, I got flummoxed by the following error, observed when running the Gateway transaction /UI2/FLP to access the launchpad : 

This was aiming for URL :

http://<gateway box>:8000/sap/bc/ui2/flp?sap-client=001&sap-language=EN

However, other users were aiming for the following, which worked:

http://<gateway box>:8000/sap/bc/ui5_ui5/ui2/ushell/shells/abap/Fiorilaunchpad.html?sap-client=001&sap-language=EN#Shell-home

Without much explanation... but this is your workaround!

TechEd Barcelona 2018 Review

   So I attended TechEd last week – there was a lot of good stuff to learn, and you’ll be unsurprised to read that it all had a somewhat “Cloud”-y focus, with a twist of HANA / S4 in there too…

I tended to categorise what I saw into 2 blocks  :

1 : Newer ways of doing essentially the same job, but adapting to SAP’s new development mechanisms…

Including :

• Developing using Eclipse rather than SE80
• Developing using WebIDE
• CDS views on the HANA Database
• More interaction between Development, Functional and End-User as an app is developed, using tools like BUILD. (This one’s an interesting one, as it might mean we need to change the way we consult a little, as we’ve traditionally not embarked on much work till we’ve got a proper spec)

2: Cool things that you can do with Cloud Services…

Including :

• Training a ChatBot using recast.ai
• Using AI to recognise images
• Connecting IoT devices to SAP

I’m highly conscious that there’s a degree of scepticism as to whether it’s worth learning any of this stuff if our customers don’t adopt it, or SAP suddenly come out with another new product/methodology that supercedes what we’ve just learnt. I’m less concerned about this now, as SAP haven’t changed their tune on Cloud/HANA for a while now, and it’s starting to stick, as we get more and more customers using S4 and Fiori, I think it’s only a matter of time before we see Cloud adoption.

I’m also aware that, as with any training, it’s done in a very hygienic environment. A demonstration of developing in the Cloud had a step where you “select the backend system from a dropdown”. The reality would be more like “Required system not in dropdown…. Go and bother BASIS team… Set up Cloud Connector… have arguments with people about what can/can’t be exposed to the internet… need upgrade/patching to get backend to the point it can connect… then select system from a dropdown”.

All that said, I'm looking forward to trying a lot of this stuff out, and will drop some links / tuts here as I make them.

HANA Core Data Services

I've been getting to grips recently with the Core Data Services and the ABAP Development Toolkit in Eclipse. I do like dropping into Eclipse from time to time, and it's a nice environment to use once it's been loaded, which can take a while. 

There's two things I've learned today... one is that the filters in Data Preview sometimes need the leading zeroes dropping in : I've spent ages getting rubbish data against Material 123456789 when I really needed 00000123456789. Kicked myself so hard when that one happened.

One of my problems with CDS in ADT is that I'm used to SE80 jumping into SE11 when I double click on an object.

Not here in ADT! I'm forced to go and find the thing.

Whether this is intentional, and will force devs to be all organised in the way they store their definitions, I don't know. There's a lot to like about the way Eclipse integrates with SAP, and time will tell whether it gets adopted by the community, but this feels like a step backwards.