Community Project ZGEOCODE

[gregorw]

During SAP Inside Track Bonn 2010 renald.wittwer/blog held a presentation on how to integrate WebDynpro ABAP Flash Islands with OpenStreetMap. As I do contribute to OpenStreetMap (OSM) already for more than a year now it made me think if OSM is ready to be used for Geocoding. Four years ago I've did that using the Geocode Business Partner with Google Maps and Geocoding - the next step: Routing with Map24 AJAX API. Pascal Neis pointed me to the Nominatim service that can be used for Geocoding. So I started investigating and today you can try out the ZGEOCODE project.

How it works

The Nominatim service provides an XML interface that can be called via HTTP submitting an address that should be geocoded. This service is used in the ZCL_GEOCODE_NOMINATIM class that implements the IF_GEOCODING_TOOL interface. This interface has to be defined to allow customer or partner solutions to be used for geocoding i.e. business partners. When the class is activated via the customizing the found geographic informaition is saved in the GEOLOC table. To access this data you can use the class ZCL_GEOCODE_HELPER.

Usage

Demo Program ZGEOCODE_NOMINATIM_READ_BP

To do a quick test of the Geocoding result without any additional customizing you can use the ZGEOCODE_NOMINATIM_READ_BP program. It will allows you to search for all existing business partners and display them in a list. Then just click on the partner id like here 101:



Then you will be directed to the map showing the Business Partner location:

Extend BP Transaction with map display

thorsten.franz3/blog who is an expert on the Business Data Toolset (BDT) helped me to get the map integrated in the transaction BP. Together with Tobias Trapp he had written the Book "ABAP Objects: Application Development from Scratch" which is covering BDT in detail.

As you can see from the screen shot below OpenStreetMap can me nicely integrated in the BP transaction:

PC-UI People Centric User Interface

Unfortunately I don't have a CRM 6.0 or 7.0 system available where I can integrate the map into the CRM WebUI. But the SAP NetWeaver 7.01 SR1 SP3 ABAP Developer Edition (NSP) comes with the PC-UI framework which is shown in the next screenshot:



So if you like to use that in your own system check out the SCN Wiki Page on ZGEOCODE.