Background documentationIntegrating Applications into the Portal Locate this document in the navigation structure

 

Applications developed in the SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (CE) can be integrated into the SAP NetWeaver CE portal with the following tools:

  • Generic Portal Application Layer (GPAL): iViews, pages and other portal objects are created using the Generic Portal Application Layer (GPAL), which exposes applications and portlets deployed to AS Java.

    The applications are displayed in the Portal Catalog within repository folders, and separate repository folders exist for different types of applications.

    The following shows what types of applications are exposed by GPAL, and what portal objects can be created from the applications:

    Application Type

    Portal Objects

    Portal

    iViews, layouts

    Web Dynpro

    pages, layouts

    Visual Composer

    Pages

    Portlets

    (For example: JSR 168 / JSR 286 portlets)

    iViews

    For more information, see Working with GPAL Repositories.

  • Portal Modeling: Visual Composer provides tools for modeling content, including iViews, pages, roles and worksets. These tools enable visual modeling of portal content, and make it easier to deploy and maintain this content.

    For more information, see Modeling Portal Content with Visual Composer.

External applications can also be integrated into the portal. The portal provides an infrastructure that enables you to create portal components that serve as templates for iViews representing the external remote applications.

For more information, see Working with the Application Integrator.

Running Content in a Production Environment

The SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment can be used as a standalone development or test environment that runs applications in its own portal, or as a production environment that runs applications in portal content and then exposes the content to a central portal in a federated portal network.

The following is the supported production scenario:

  1. Use SAP NetWeaver CE to develop and deploy applications, and to create portal content from these applications using GPAL or Portal Modeling.

  2. Use SAP NetWeaver 7.0 as the central portal for users to access content.

  3. Set up a federated portal network between the two SAP NetWeaver installations.

  4. Expose the deployed content (on the SAP NetWeaver CE installation) to the users of the central portal.

For more information on setting up a federated portal network in SAP NetWeaver CE, see Running Content in a Remote Portal using FPN.

For a complete workflow for creating portal content from deployed applications, see Integrating Content into the SAP NetWeaver CE Portal.