Launchpad Architecture: Overview

Overview of the SAP Fiori launchpad architecture: The major technical building blocks and how apps are embedded.

The SAP Fiori launchpad is based on the unified shell architecture. The guiding principle of the unified shell is to have a single, platform-independent, client-side runtime environment that can be hosted on different server platforms, for example SAP NetWeaver AS for ABAP, SAP HANA, SAP HANA Cloud Platform. This means that the shell offers unified services with platform-independent interfaces (APIs) to the hosted apps and shell components. To achieve platform-specific behavior, the implementations of these services can utilize different service adapters of the respective platform.

The visualization of the shell is independent of the shell services. The shell renderer can be replaced by a different implementation. The apps are embedded in a so-called application container. This application container is an independent reuse component and so the embedding aspect is decoupled from the renderer. The application container can host SAPUI5 components, Web Dynpro ABAP applications, and SAP GUI for HTML transactions. The central shell container manages the shell services and renderers. It utilizes a runtime configuration that defines the implementations for services, adapters, and the shell renderer, as well as global settings like theme, language, system, and user data.

The runtime configuration is fed by the following settings:

• Static configuration settings in the hosting HTML page
• Dynamic configuration data read from the front-end server during startup
• Dynamic settings passed as query parameters in the URL

Finally, all described JavaScript components are embedded into a single HTML page. The SAP Fiori launchpad implementation of the SAP NetWeaver AS for ABAP front-end server contains a standard page called FioriLaunchpad.html. You can create custom start pages which utilize the shell with different static configurations.

The following figure shows the described building blocks of the SAP Fiori launchpad architecture.