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Component documentation SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio (Enhancements) Locate the document in its SAP Library structure

Technical Data

Function is

New

Release

Software Component

·        Component:  SAP_BASIS

·        Release: 6.40

Assignment to Application Component

BC-DWB-JAV

 

Country Setting

Valid for all countries

Use

With Release 6.40 of the SAP Web AS, the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio offers several enhancements that make the development of applications for the J2EE Engine even more comfortable. While the focus is on new features in the Web Dynpro tool set, other areas of the Studio, e.g. the EJB or Web Services tools, have gained some interesting new capabilities as well.

Offering a comprehensive environment for programming in Java, the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio supports the full spectrum of activities for building business applications, from modeling to maintenance and from user interface design to transaction management.

General improvements

Compared to the version of the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio that came with Web AS 6.30, the new version offers some improvements that apply generally to different kinds of development projects:

J2EE Tools: Redesign of J2EE projects

Until now, the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio organized J2EE applications into 5 different project types: Enterprise application, EJB assembly, Web application, EJB and Web. The current version of Developer Studio reduces the number of J2EE project types from 5 to 3: Enterprise application, EJB module and Web module .

 

Web Dynpro Tools: Enhanced productivity

The Web Dynpro tool set now contains a new graphical tool, the so-called Data Modeler. The Data Modeler displays all the controllers in a component and allows you to design the usages and mappings between them in a graphical way.

The new Form Layout Wizard relieves you of the time-consuming task of designing the layout of input screens that contain many fields.

The new View Designer has learned many ways to make better use of meta-information:

Following Web Dynpro’s overall philosophy to favor declarative techniques over coding, it is now possible to associate a navigation step with an action, instead of coding the navigation in the action’s event handler. In the same vein, the creation of component instances can now be left to the framework – it is no longer possible to deal with that in event handler coding. The other way around, you can now create a new method by just entering the code for the method body; the tools will automatically recognize the method and add it to the controller’s meta-data.

Web Dynpro: Integration of Adobe Forms

SAP announced a while ago that we have entered a working relationship with Adobe, with the aim to integrate Adobe’s fine products into our offerings in many different ways. The integration of Adobe Forms into Web Dynpro has now been achieved: A new user interface control can now be put into the layout of Web Dynpro views, which will host the Adobe Forms viewer at runtime. For allowing the developer to design the form, the View Designer in the Web Dynpro toolset can branch directly into the Adobe Forms designer.

Web Dynpro: Integration of new model types

With the introduction of Web Services as a possible model type, Web Dynpro now offers a much more comprehensive set of choices for connecting a Web Dynpro front-end to an existing backend system. The developer can now point the model wizard to an arbitrary Web Service on the Internet and have the code for accessing this Web Service generated automatically.

Also existing model interfaces, especially the RFC-based type of model, have been improved. We speak of the “adaptive RFC” model, because it is now able to adapt to changes in the interface of the function model it calls. This is very important in cases where the customer wants to enhance existing backend logic, e.g. to add fields to the standard tables. It is now possible to easily re-generate the RFC model layer of a Web Dynpro application to account for those changes and allow transporting the added fields to the front-end layer.

Java Dictionary: Services for Web Dynpro

The Java Dictionary has also been considerably enhanced, mainly to even better support the design of Web Dynpro applications.

It is now possible to import and cache data type definitions from ABAP Dictionaries, especially data structures that appear in the interface of function modules that are used in RFC model layer. Data structures in the dictionary – whether imported or not – can now be used to define the structure of nodes in Web Dynpro contexts.

Finally, the dictionary helps in converting values from internal to external representation. Currently, both the conversion of currency values and the well-known Alpha-Conversion, heavily used in R/3 applications, are supported.

Web Services Perspective

Using the Web Services perspective in the Developer Studio, you can expose arbitrary functionality that you implemented in a Java class or Session Bean asa Web Service. The Web service perspective is divided into four parts:

Effects on System Administration

SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio requires:

SAP J2EE Server requires:

 

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