Using Object-Based Navigation in a Federated Portal Network

Use

Content usage mode: remote role assignment, remote delta link

Applies to: producers, consumers

Object-based navigation (OBN) is an advanced navigational concept based on business objects and business object extensions called operations . Operations are launched by user-initiated clientside events or server requests; they are implemented by target applications, such as iViews and pages.

For more information about OBN, see Object-Based Navigation in the portal administration documentation.

A federated portal network supports OBN in both remote role assignment and remote delta link usage modes. A federated portal network also supports OBN even if the iViews were created on an SAP NetWeaver 7.0 producer.

However, the remote producer-consumer connection scenario causes OBN navigation to be resolved during runtime differently than in a single-portal environment. This requires the administrators of the federated portal network to be aware of the differences and take some additional steps to ensure proper object-based navigation.

Requirements for 'Remote Role Assignment' Usage

When working with remote role assignment usage, OBN resolving takes place on the producer. The iView containing the OBN source link must exist on the producer. Activating an OBN link in an iView that exists on the consumer portal initiates a target search on the consumer only.

OBN resolving in the federated portal network scenario is user-based, so the one-to-one user mapping between the consumer portal and producer portal demands that the user role set on the consumer encompass the corresponding role set on the producer. In other words, the roles of the user on the producer must have corresponding roles contained in the user role set on the consumer.

Information About 'Remote Delta Link' Usage

When working in remote delta link mode, the resolution of OBN calls takes place on the consumer. Object-based navigation support for remote delta link usage includes two methods of copying business objects and operations from producer to consumer:

  • Copying a business object

  • Copying an iView or page, which is an OBN target

    In this case, the business object upon which the target is based is copied to the consumer portal.

Behavior and Recommendations

It is possible, when copying a target iView to the consumer, that the business object upon which the iView is based, already exists on the consumer. In this case, you can expect the following behavior:

  • The business object on the consumer will be overwritten; its location is not important. The folder structure on the consumer does not need to mirror that of the producer.

  • The business object operations on the consumer will be consolidated with those of the producer business object. This means that:

    • Operations existing on the producer, but which the consumer business object does not have, are added to the consumer business object.

    • Operations of the consumer business object, which have the same ID as operations of the producer business object, are overwritten - meaning that the non-unique properties of the operation (name and priority) will change, if they are different on the producer.

Synchronization

  • Changes made to the properties of iViews on the producer are reflected in the properties of the corresponding copies on the consumer; unless the properties have been modified directly in the target delta link object on the consumer.

  • Changes made to the properties of business objects on the producer are not reflected in the properties of the corresponding copies on the consumer.

    However, upon the synchronization of a target iView, which was modified on the consumer, the properties of its respective business object are also synchronized.

Runtime Limitation

A content developer may create an OBN source iView to call the OBN service to run code that processes a number of target iViews and displays them at runtime for the user to choose from in a context menu that is accessed from the source iView.

With remote delta link usage, the federated portal network does not support this implementation of OBN, regardless of whether the source iView calling the OBN service was created in your current version of SAP NetWeaver, or earlier in SAP NetWeaver 7.0 and then upgraded to your current version.