How are xMII services delivered?

[Former Member]

We are looking into the possibility of using xMII to either replace or enhance an existing ASP.NET, C#-based application, which is used to report and display manufacturing data stored in SAP and in standalone Oracle databases (these are populated by VB applications written by the engineers in manufacturing).

I have installed a trial version of xMII, and I can see that it allows data connectivity to both Oracle and SAP, and it appears that I can connect our data to Applets.

How do most sites deliver these services to their users? For example, assume I have built a page that contains an applet that displays some data. How do I deliver that page to my users? My first impression is (because I am an ASP.NET guy) that the easiest thing for me to do would be to use ASP.NET as a front-end to structure the application and to deliver pages to the users, and to make use of xMII as a place to get the Applets and data that will be provided, but I suspect that I am suffering from a brain cramp, and that there is a better way.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Ryan - one other consideration is that xMII can deliver its pages via any portal wrapper. Whether that is xMII's built-in "lite portal", SAP Enterprise Portal, or Microsoft SharePoint. In V12.0, with Kerberos, you can even achieve single-sign-on easily with SharePoint.

Also, virtually all of xMII's capabilities are available to you to consume as services (either via URL requests or web services) - including the charting and SPC/SQC engine(s), dynamic graphics engine, data access engine, business logic services, and other capabilities.

I've successfully consumed them from environments such as ASP, custom .NET apps, custom Java apps, Flash, Adobe Flex, and others.

- Rick

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan,

Here are the few features of xMII.

1. The current version of xMII (11.5) is built on IIS and Servlet Engine.All the objects run on servlet engine.

2. Provide inbuilt features of security and access control. You can control the access of perticular database connection, specific development object like query template, display template.

3. Automate process using the Business logic transactions.

4. Can use your own custom HTML/jsp code.

Even though xMII 11.5 is bulit on IIS I will not recomend to use ASP pages alone with xMII as the next version 12.0 expected in third quarter of 2007 is built on J2EE of SAP WEB AS.

Hope this additional info will also help.

Thanx & Regards

Vinod

[sufw]

Hi Ryan,

we deliver xMII report and dashboards the "standard" way - as irpt pages. IRPT files are basically plain HTML files which are interpreted by a IIS plugin on the xMII server. This plug-in enables some extra functionality, such as creating and referencing tokens (e.g. session variables, name of the logged-in user, etc.) using braces (e.g. will be interpreted by the ServletExec-xMII service and is rendered as HTML text).

IRPTs support xMII applets and all other HTML features. Using them, you can build fairly simple web pages which rely on JavaScript for interactivity. However, IRPTs have another interesting feature. xMII objects (charts, tables, etc.) can be rendered as images or HTML tables using out-of-the-box transformations. This is done using HTML-like <servlet> tags inside your IRPT page. The ServletExec-xMII service parses them and replaces these elements with HTML tables, images, etc as applicable. For more info on this, have a look at the xMII help under Advanced Topics > Reports

However, since the ServletExec service which processes the IRPT pages is also capable of interpreting JSP pages, you can do some server-side processing similar to ASP.Net. I don't think this is "officially" supported by SAP, but we use it in a very cases where it makes sense to do so. xMII comes with some custom classes which you can use - they are not documented, but you can get quite a bit of info from the pages which form the xMII Portal (i.e. the security manager and the main menu). They are somewhat hidden in C:\ServletExec AS\se-xMII\webapps\default\Lighthammer (the "user" portal where you access Data Servers, Query Templates, etc.) and C:\ServletExec AS\se-xMII\webapps\default\LHSecurity (the security manager)

Hope this helps. Good luck with exploring xMII!

Sascha

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan,

In xMII you can do customization at three levels,

1. At portal level as explained by Sabareesh.

2. You can restrict the user to access the data in data access tab

3. You can give the authorizationa in the Query/Display templates and in BLS.

Thanks,

Rajesh

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan

Once u have the required applets on a page . Then you can assign those page to particular users or roles.

For assigning a page to a particular user follow these steps:

1) create a new user in security Services/user management

2)Click the Portal services tab and select Navigation.

3) Select user in the dropdown on the left top of the navigation screen and select the required user.

4)select the add button under Navigation tree and select the page which you want to assign and save.

5)logout and login with the new user you hav created to see the page you hav assigned.

If this doent help or if i hav understood the question wrongly please get back to me

Bye