dialog programming (non-web based)

[Former Member]

We have been running SAP for a number of years and have a number of custom tables and custom ABAP report programs. At this point we use spreadsheet uploads and sm30 to maintain our custom tables. We are now looking at getting into Dialog programming, we will be running these dialog programs with in the SAP GUI not over the internet.

Most of the web sites I have found for dialog programming in ABAP are talking about Web dynpro. Can anyone tell me if there is a difference between Web dynpro and non-web dialog programming?

Thanks,

Jerry

[Former Member]

Hi Jerry,

Yeah there is a difference between dialog programming and webdypro.

dialog programming - it runs in normal sap system.

webdypro - it runs in browser (internet).

The design of the screens and flow and concepts are different for both of them.

The link for Dialog Programming is

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/fc/eb2d40358411d1829f0000e829fbfe/frameset.htm

Regards

Sajid

[Former Member]

Hi,

Dailog programming in SAP:-

It includes different screens..with user interaction, you can maintain different function buttons or status icons on screens .....

Screens can be called in different programs and then user for user interaction..

It is limited to SAP only.

In webdynpro Dailog programming

you can use those screen on web browsers.

Thanks

manish

[Former Member]

Thanks for the replies this is what I thought.

It is being suggested that we can write a dialog using Web dynpro and have it display and act exactly the same over the internet and within the GUI. So that the user experience is the same no matter which method they use.

This sounds logical to me.

When I read the link I clicked on the dynpro link and then went to up 2 levels to the u2018SAP GUI Technologyu2019 page and found the following:

Although screen programming permits, in principle, the use of the model-view-controller approach, this is not explicitly supported by the Framework or the existing tools. There is therefore a significant mixing of presentation and application logic within a program in most screen-based applications. To achieve better maintainability, you should therefore structure the user interfaces of new ABAP-based applications with Web << OLE Object: Picture (Metafile) >> Dynpro ABAP, even if no use of the Internet is currently intended.

This would imply that that using web dynpro you can create a dialog that looks and acts the same over the internet and within the GUI.

We found a Blog with the title Web Dynpro: Running Web Dynpro Applications over SAPGUI that makes reference to the function module WDY_EXECUTE_IN_PLACE, with a parameter INTERNALMODE = u2018Xu2019 that will allow the screen to be displayed in the SAP GUI.

Then I was directed to SAP NOTE 1098009 which says:

· No SAP GUI support

The use of Web Dynpro ABAP applications inside SAP GUI is not supported due to technical restrictions which may inhibit the correct behavior of applications under some circumstances.

· No support for SAP GUI dynpros

Note that in an input help which is called by Web Dynpro ABAP classic SAP GUI based dynpros are not supported. From NetWeaver 7.0 SP12 onwards there is no longer a program dump, but a message is displayed accordingly, so that the application can be continued.

There seems to be conflicting information out there. Does anyone have any experience with this? Can you please point me to some documentation that will explain if this is possible or not.

Thanks,

Jerry

[Former Member]

Hi Jerry,

I don't really have an answer to your question - but I am suffering from the same dilemma - as I'm sure are many out there in the real SAP world.

We are going through exactly the same reasoning at my customer. SAP are pushing ABAP web dynpro as the UI tech to use ongoing into the future (if you're developers are ABAP based) - but it is not clear how it can easily be incorporated into the standard gui - or even if it should. It seems you need to define a control - that is associated with a browser - and then have your application within this control.

Has anyone out there tried this approach for real - on a broad development basis. I'm very keen on pushing our programming team to follow MVC development for all UI development (and I know this can be done to some extent with legacy dynpro - but its ugly)- we are handicapped at my customer by having to operate within SAPGUI - which is the environment where the vast majority of our users do their day to day work. Getting the user base to migrate away from SAPGUI, just for certain applications - is not a simple thing to do either.

I asked this question at Teched (US) last year and basically got the answer that we should code webdynpro - and that there is a workaround for the SAPGUI - but I do not see lots of articles on how to follow this approach... and I wonder if anyone has seriously put this approach into practice anywhere?

Regards,

Julian

[christine_evans]

In this situation ie you're not sure which way to go, I would start by trying to be as flexible as possible.

If I had to build a new application, I would start by creating a class to hold all my application logic. The sort of thing that you do in BSP when you create a model class.

I would then have the freedom to create different frontends for my application, each one using the code contained in my class. So, I could start by building a traditional dynpro frontend to run in the SAPGui and then perhaps build a WebDynpro frontend to run from the web. Since all the main processing and complicated code would be contained in one place in the class, the frontend program would just need to present the data to the user, deal with screen navigation, pass data into and out of the class etc - all thngs that take time but not as much time as building an entire application from scratch.

This has worked well for me in migrating an application from BSP to ABAP WebDynpro.

As a personal opinion, since Abap WebDynpro is more fun that traditional dynpro programming, and it's quite new to me, I'd always try to go for that. Though I wouldn't want to run it from the SAPGui. If I were restricted to a single frontend that had to run from the SAPGui and the web, I'd use a traditional dynpro since you can run it easily eg from the Portal just by creating an iView for it.

[Former Member]

Jerry - Look at the sample programs in Dev. Class SDWA in the Object naviator. There are few programs which gives you the basics of dialog programming

Sam.