Low cost mobile solution

[#1]

Hello All,

I have a small customer who wants to go mobile, but with a tightly constrained budget. What are our options? There will be only aprox. ten end users.

Thanks for your help.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Nicole,

We had a similar situation, and developed a system called zMob that allows easy creation of standard ABAP reports that are converted on the fly into mobile applications. More information is available in these SCN articles (disclaimer, authored by myself 😞

http://scn.sap.com/community/mobile/blog/2013/09/07/video-tutorial-on-creating-your-first-mobile-app...

http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2013/09/01/abap-report--mobile-application

And here's a screenshot and video demonstrating the functionality:

Regards,

  Jack

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

This looks interesting - I saw the video on SCN earlier in the week. How flexible is the mobile application - is it customizable? Can it show the result of existing reports or must the customer redevelop everything to work with this?

Thanks

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

No - you can take your existing reports and call them from a new report containing the same parameters. For example, say originally you had the report:

report Z_ORIGINAL.

parameters p_werks type werks.

start-of-selection.

write: 'do smg complicated with p_werks: ', p_werks.

Then this report could be wrapped with a zMob report as follows:

report Z_MOBILE_WRAP.

parameters p_werks type zmob=>ui_text.

start-of-selection.

data orig_werks type werks.

orig_werks = p_werks.

submit 'Z_ORIGINAL'

  with p_werks = orig_werks

  and return.

zMob would generate a mobile application from Z_MOBILE_WRAP, including a single input. Once data is posted, the report Z_ORIGINAL would be called with the value for p_werks posted in the mobile app, and the results would be shown on the screen to the user of the mobile application. In our example, if we were to enter the text "work hard" into the mobile app, the result screen would say "do smg complicated with p_werks: work hard".

A great example is the open source Microbe project: https://code.google.com/p/microbe/wiki/Home. Scroll down to the bottom for the goodies.

Here's a screen shot showing the connection between the report and the mobile app:

Note: the Hidden elements and Original Report sections are not shown in the production environment

Let me know if you have any more questions, I'm happy to be of service Regarding customisation, currently this is not possible, but plans are in the works!

[soldner · Accepted solution]

Jack, I don't know if you have another blog for zMob and I apologize to Nicole for hijacking this.

You aren't talking about a ALV type output are you? 

i didn't see many examples on the wiki,

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Steve,

As it happens I've been talking with Basar about integrating his solution into zMob which would allow developers to show ALV data in the START-OF-SELECTION section of their reports and zMob to relay the table data to the user. So yes, at some point in the near future zMob shall support ALV type output.

But currently zMob only supports outputting data using the write statement within the report, which is then processed for tags and rendered on the target device (see this site for examples.) Tags can be links to other reports, which allows the user to navigate from report to report.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

No problem Steve, this is an interesting question also!

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Does this support charts and graphs, or only tables of data? How would a developer pass table data to the mobile app?

Thanks

[soldner · Accepted solution]

And what about inputting data?  Nicole has z reports that update masterdata.

At work, I haven't gotten permission to develop mobile that update masterdata, we use a portal to do that. The mobile I've done just reports.  I used John Moy's example and developed webapps to view pay and time, and sm37/sm37/we05 for us developers who also must monitor our nightly processes. 

[basarozgur_kahraman · Accepted solution]

Hello Nicole,

Charts and graphs are created by mysapreport depending on the table. You need to create a ITS service that takes tcode & variant variable as input and return ALV data & ALV fieldcatalog in JSON format. Mysapreport parses ALV data and create table according to ALV fieldcatalog dynamicly. After creating service, developer no need to do anything to pass data to mobile.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Steve,

zMob would allow input of data via the mobile app, and the data would be posted back to the original report, allowing display of graphs and charts via mysapreport - it sounds like a combination of zMob and Basar's mysapreport would solve the problem

[soldner · Accepted solution]

This sounds promising for me, I don't know about Nicole though. 

I've got a CATS portal implementation to get thru before I can really focus on something else.  I have been developing BSP-JqueryMobile for a "mobile ESS portal" for us. So maybe about November I can circle back to see how zMob and mysapreport can work for us. 

I'll be lurking in the background now.

Thanks Nicole for such a great thread!!

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

After discussion with the customer, we're going to give this approach a try Thank you very much Jack, Basar and Steve for your help in clarifying the details. And thank you to every one who contributed ideas to my original question

[soldner · Accepted solution]

Nicole,

Would you post your experiences afterwards?

Good luck with the project!

Steve

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Steve,

Certainly, and thanks