Anybody aware of SAP module(s) being built using PowerBuilder or any road-map in place for such development in future.
There are some modules built in PowerBuilder. As we become more familiar with our SAP side of the business, we are hopeful to learn about more. We've met with the teams that build these modules and are understanding their roadmap and we've discussed the PowerBuilder roadmap with them as well.
Are you using PB to customize SAP? I'd be interested in discussing more of what prompted your question - please email me! I am out of the office today and tomorrow but will be back next week.
Sue Dunnell
PowerBuilder Product Manager
dunnell#sybase.com
If I'm understanding correctly you are wanting to call existing BAPI's via PowerBuilder; for example create a Purchase Requisition using the built in BAPI CreaeFromData ? I have created a couple back in version 8 or 9 of PB and it was quite a challenge it is totally do-able. I have code for creating Purchase Requisitions and have code which calls a custom "in-house" written BAPI.
I actually thought about building an API for all the SAP BAPI's because of how difficult it was and I can usually find the answer to anything on the web, but not this; had to trial and error it.
Two hints. Study the BAPI in SAP Object Explorer or maybe it was called BAPI Browser can't remember, but SAP shows the parameters in different order depending on which way you look at them. To make them work in PB you have to call the parms in the exact order, unlike the Microsoft languages where you can do named arguments and such. Then you have to be sure to make all REF types REF. Any ONE item wrong and you get the dreaded system crash which tells you nothing. If PowerBuilder had not started losing popularity I would have kept writing APIs for various BAPIs
Contact me if you want any sample code. I can't give any exact code from one of my corporate clients but would be happy to get you going in the right direction.
Sincerely,
R
Related
I would like to create a Revit add-in that is able to create, modify and produce a window or door that can be loaded into Revit. I would also like to be able to use that information to fill out a window or door schedule. I found the windowWizard in the Revit 2022 SDK that I wanted to study but it seems that the steps to implement it are quite old, as a lot of the steps are no longer needed. I'm curious if there is an updated walkthrough anywhere for the WindowsWizard.
I'm also curious why it seems this is now only possible through Forge. Am I understanding this correctly or is there a way to create a similar addin like the WindowWizard that doesn't require forge?
I don’t have handy access to it now, but I think it still works as-is. No Forge is required to run it inside of Revit as an addin. Forge is only required if you want to send a model and the UI inputs to the cloud to be executed…
Where can I find the code for creating an online rebol console like the one here ?
http://tryrebol.esperconsultancy.nl/
Update: for the sandbox system on the server, can't Rebol manage it itself with some security wrapper and its security options ?
As for console itself, I don't know Ruby so I don't want to use TryRuby and why would I need it ? Can't I mimic Rebol console itself by "remoting" it somehow ? Why RT or Esper Consultancy can't make an opensource version ? There's no value in keeping it closed source. Rebol needs to prove it's more open than in the past.
In my opinion, you should aim higher with something like the already open-sourced Try Ruby. You'd type in expressions and it would guide you. Their showcase site is at tryruby.org and is fairly slick.
I modified TryRuby to work with Rebol and it wound up looking like this:
But I'm not going to run it on my server because I didn't want to belabor the necessary sandboxing/etc. or protections against someone running an infinite loop. I can give you what I've got so far if you want it.
I started a tutorial script here that no one seemed interested in helping me with, so I wandered off to other tasks:
http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Interactive_tutorial_script
I'm not sure what exactly you want. You mention you want a remote REBOL shell instead of a tutoring setup, but that's what the Try REBOL site is. There are several reasons it's not open source:
It's in heavy development. I'm currently changing the code regularly.
So it's not in a release state. Preparing it for release, documenting and publishing it would take a lot of extra work, as with most projects.
It's written in my CMS that's also in heavy development. Even if the Try REBOL site were open source, it wouldn't run. The CMS is not planned to be open sourced soon.
It's not meant as a generic REBOL remoting tool, but as a one-off demo site. If that site is running, what's the use of more of them?
As others have answered, there are many generic solutions for remoting that you could use. Also, most parts of the Try REBOL site are readily available as open source:
Syllable Server, produced and published by us.
The Cheyenne web server.
The HTML source of the web client can be viewed, including my simple JavaScript command service bus.
Syllable Server is an essential part of the site, as the sandboxing is not done with REBOL facilities (except some extra limits in the R3 backend), but with standard Linux facilities.
A truly air tight (do I mean silica tight?) sandbox is close to impossible with R2.
R3 (still in alpha) is looking a lot more promising. The deep technical discussions in flight right now (see Cure code and AltME/REBOL3 Proposals regarding unwinds and protect and even occasionally mentioning sandboxes should lead to an excellent sandbox capability.
Right now, the big advance R3 has that makes Kaj's tryREBOL possible is R3's secure policy settings which make it possible (with some careful wrapper code) to construct an alpha/demo sandbox.
To answer your precise question("where can I find code...", you could try asking Kaj for his :)
I'm new to StackOverflow. I'm not sure if this is going to end up as a reply to your comment, or as a new answer.
The somewhat common idea that any project can be open sourced and contributed to by others is a naive view. In the case of my Try REBOL site, it makes no sense. It's not just in heavy development; it's written in a CMS that's also in heavy development. Basically noone could contribute to it at this point, because I'm the only one who knows my CMS. Or in any case its newest features, which I develop by developing Try REBOL, and other example sites. So developing Try REBOL means developing the CMS at the same time, and by definition, I'm the only one who can do that.
More generally, my projects are bleeding edge, innovative technology with a strong vision. The vision is mine, and to teach it to others, I have to build it to show how I intended it to work. So there's a catch 22: to enable others to contribute, I have to finish my projects first, because people typically don't understand them until I show them how they work.
There certainly are other projects where mass contribution makes more sense. Still, only the top projects get the contributors. We found that out the hard way. We created Syllable Desktop and Syllable Server with surrounding infrastructure for contributions. These are fairly classic, well understood operating systems that many people could work on in parallel. However, despite years of begging, we get very few contributions.
So, if you feel a burning need to contribute to our projects, please pick one of the many tasks in Syllable to execute. :-)
I'm a small developer in VB6 and VB.net, and use for bugtracking a simple Excel. Seemed to me that I didnt need anything more.
I've wanted to add links to the code. Then:
How can I do it for vb6 and for vs.net?
Is this reasonable? Should I change to a (free) bugtracking tool? Do they have this functionality?
There's a list of bug-trackers in this question.
Do you want to link source code changes to particular bug fixes? That means integrating your bug-tracker with your version-control / revision-control system. (You do have version control, right? It's essential.) You could check the Wikipedia bug-tracker comparison table looking at the revision control integration column.
FogBugz is popular on StackOverflow, I hear it does integrate with version control, and it is free for one-person companies. Disclaimer: it was developed by a founder of Stack Overflow, so that may bias StackOverflow users in its favour slightly.
What are the software/ Wiki you use to write and share your specs about the developers, testers and management?
Do you use Wiki system, and if so, what Wiki software you use?
Or do you use Sharepoint to manage and version the specs? One problem with SharePoint 2003 as specs platform is that it's very hard to collaborate among different people.
For backward compatibility sake, I would also like to have the platform able to import Microsoft Word seamlessly. And it would certainly help if the interface is similar to Microsoft Word.
Any idea?
I've used Confluence at a number of places, it's a pretty powerful wiki and very good for creating specifications that can be shared amongst various parties. See:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/
There's some more information here on the advantages of using Confluence:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/170352/confluence-experiences
EDIT: I've updated this to deal with the Microsoft Word import feature you mentioned. Confluence supports this through the Office Connector here:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/office-connector.jsp
There's also a Sharepoint connector:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp
plus a whole bunch of plugins:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp
Some of these are user contributed also. I can't recommend Confluence enough as a commercial wiki.
I've also used JSPWiki, which is open source. it's ok but not as good as confluence, see:
http://www.jspwiki.org/
You could try Google docs - I have successfully used this in the past. It supports import / export to MS Word, and it has great support for multiple user - see http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/8236.aspx.
It supports versioning, allows you to chat with other people who are currently working on the document, and shows you a list of all the changes others have made to the document (without needing to close / reopen the document).
If you want corporate support, Google also provides that - see Google Apps for business.
We use SharePoint -- it's not ideal, but it does a decent job. If I were you, I would seriously look at getting off SharePoint 2003 and on to MOSS (SharePoint 2007). It's not perfect, but it's substantially better. Here's a little bit on using MOSS as a wiki. I think in general wiki's are a good tool for getting people up to speed on your system. We used to pass around "getting started documents" and now we have all that type of stuff in our developer portal.
Per John's comment, I looked up this feature comparison. I have to go back and look at what features I'm using that are not in WSS -- I might be paying for licenses I don't need! :)
We use email. I know it isn't elaborate, but it is easy to use. Everyone has it installed and there are no licensing issues. All spec changes are sent to an super set email distro indicating the updates and the location on the network share where the spec can be found.
We use Alfresco, in its Community version, from both its Share and Explorer web interfaces.
Quite useful, with a document library, wiki, forum and calendar.
We curently host about 1.8 Go consisting mainly in docs, versionned and sometimes automatically converted to PDF (by creating an automatic content rule).
FTP, WebDav and network share are also used to access to the same repository.
You could take a look at Microsoft Groove - the collaboration software that Microsoft bought a few years back.
It's bundled free with premium versions of Microsoft Office.
You can customize the workspace with discussion boards and can fairly seamlessly store collaboratively-edited Office documents.
We use MediaWiki for dos & specs. Wiki definitely wins anything like Microsoft Word or SharePoint - it allows you to develop a documentation in "first refer, then describe" = "divide and rule" way. Perfect for developers - they used to think the same way. The process of developing a documentation is almost ideal: you start from TOC and drill down until you write the document for every link you put earlier.
MediaWiki is quite customizable - there are lots of extensions there. The most necessary ones are:
Source code highlighter - CSO_Source
Our own templates integrating wiki with class reference.
Others are InterWiki, FileProtocolLinks, YouTube (we use customized version of it to display HD video), ReCaptcha, SpecialDeleteOldRevisions, Maintenance.
Some integration examples are here.
And we use Google issue tracker to track the issues. Its main advantages:
Imput usability: the process of adding\changing the issue is really convenient there. Earlier we tried Track Studio - the same actions require 2-3 times more time there, so it died fast simply because most of us hated to use it.
Customizable grids. See the examples. Really helpful.
Atom\RSS support. So everyone knows what's going on.
There is a Gurtle tool integrating it with TortoiseSVN. Really helpful.
Its main disadvantage is that it can't be closed from the public access. This makes it simply unusable in many cases.
If you want a UI similar to Word, why not use Word with SharePoint 2007? You're on 2003 so the experience is there. Upgrade to SharePoint 2007 and you can have the collaboration, Word features, document sharing, and so on.
This is the kind of thing Microsoft wants people to use Office for, so there's a ton of doco out there about how to configure your SharePoint and Office environment to support collaboration.
There is something that Google do in this direction and it looks really cool: wave.google.com. It would be a great step in collaboration and worth to wait it.
Here we use Google Docs it makes the documents available to everyone write or read only, public or private among people that have or not Google accounts, it also can import Word docs, not to mention that it runs directly into the browser so it has high availability with zero cost and zero setup, also its computer/OS agnostic, we have a nice experience with it.
Also perhaps you should take a look at Basecamp or Backpack at 37Signals, any of then might also fit your bill.
We use DocBook for all of our specifications (and other customer-facing documentation). DocBook is an XML format that lets you easily generate documents in just about any format, including PDF, which is how we distribute things to clients to get them signed off. We can divide a document into files (by section) and commit everything to our source control system (Subversion). Because it is all XML (i.e. text-based), Subversion's automatic merging and conflict resolution works great if two people work on the same file. We have a set of stylesheets that all of our documents use, so all documents share the exact same style/format, with no extra work on our part.
And if you don't like editing XML files directly, there are GUI front-ends that provide a reasonably WYSIWYG-like experience. I believe that most people in my office use XMLMind. Still, we happen to all be technical people so if we had to write XML directly it wouldn't be an issue.
As a sidenote, we also put out release notes. We have some XSLT that lets us write documents like this:
<bugs>
<bug id="1234" component="web">JavaScript error when clicking the Kick Me button</bug>
</bugs>
We then have a script that runs through our Subversion repository doing an svn log from the previous release tag to the current release tag, and some Bugzilla integration to automatically generate release notes on-the-fly.
(also, for most internal-only documentation, we use MediaWiki, which is also a great way to collaborate.)
We use OnTime. It was originally only used for defect tracking, but we've started using it to track features as well. These can be used to document the feature as it evolves during development. Features can be grouped together into sprints or releases, and time can be tracked against each feature. If you are using SCRUM, you can also plot burn-down charts for each sprint. It also has wiki functionality.
Our product currently spans a large number of technologies, including Java, PL/SQL, VB.Net and ABAP. We have a fairly mature source control and build system set up for all of the languages except ABAP, which is still in the stone ages. Since SAP has a build system set up within it, our engineers do all of their development in an SAP environment export transports, and check those into source control. Since we support a number of SAP versions, it becomes very difficult to track versions and migrate code across 4.6, 4.7, 5.0, etc.
My ideal process would be to check the ABAP code into source control in text files, and then load it into SAP and generate the transports as part of the build process. The SAP engineers don't think there are tools to support this model.
If you are managing ABAP code in a source control system, what does your process look like? Are there tools available (preferably command-line) for loading ABAP code into SAP? How do your engineers manage the code/test/debug cycle? Do they code in SAP and then export the code when finished, or edit in an external editor?
I used SAPLINK (mentioned in previous answer) for that purpose. There is also a related project called "zake", that supposedly can automate some of the tasks but I never used it. I simply exported my code manually to so-called slinkees (they contain single objects like function groups; nuggets on the other hand contain several objects).
Reasons to use some external source control system:
correlation to non-abap source code (as our software consisted of .net and abap code)
hosting / maintaining SAP was not something we were exactly good at, so it was good to know you had your code in a safe place
one thing though: you need at least WAS 620 in order to use saplink
I'm interested as to what the benefit is of version control outside the ABAP stack of the SAP system.
I've never seen anyone use external source code control for ABAP, as it's built right in. I've never seen anyone code ABAP outside the SAP system either. It really doesn't fit the model.
SAP's ABAP stack is a single-development system environment. All the developers log on to the one system and develop there. The system records versions automatically, and groups changed objects into transports. A transport is just a list of changed objects. Once you export the transport, the version numbers are incremented for each object and you get the package for the other systems.
The ABAP stack also doesn't really have a "build" concept as such. Everything you do is a patch.
Also check out SAP CTS+ which is used for managing transports and version control of ABAP and JAVA based components.
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/e0249083-c0ab-2a10-78b8-b7a7854b1070
At the very least, modifications should be done and tested in an SAP development system. Nobody uses an external editor with ABAP. (SAP Java on the other hand...) There is no reason why you can't keep backups of the SAP code, either directly, as text files, or, (preferably) with SAPLink or transport dump files. (Ask your BASIS people about the transport files). Realize that if you go the text file route, you might miss out on things like field text, etc., which are stored elsewhere in the database.
Hy,
As Dom told you, SAP has it's own version managment. However in order to makes regular save between transport releasing, you might use tools like :
SAPLink (as saied Wili aus Rohr)
ZAPLink
this tools could be use to extract ABAP components into XML. I really do not advise to make automatic import into SAP, for many reasons :
# thoses tools have no guaranties
# not all ABAP Compoponent can be handled like this
# you will lose SAP guaranty if you do this on a productive SAP system
But it might be interesting to use tools like (Google code) to display in detail software change, which could be more complicated on ABAP Object.
I developed this on ZAP Link framework with ZAPLINK_EXTRACTOR program that export SAP Components into XML when they have changed. This prevent XML file to change (new file but same content) and to be detected by tools such as mercurial as a change.
Hope it helps.
Keep in mind that you should use SAP tools to change SAP Component. SAP consultant might explain it to you in details.
Taryck.
[http://www.steria.com Steria (France)]
The 2020 answer to the question is simply: Use AbapGit.
It gives you all the advantages of modern version control, is fully documented, open source and works like a charm.