Beginning With an MI Project

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Beginning with an MI Project

Applies to:Mobile Infrastructure 7.0, Mobile Assessment Management 3.0 and Mobile Assessment for Utilities 3.0. Formore information, visit the Mobile homepage .

SummaryThe main purpose of this article is to explain all the concepts, attention points and considerations of a MobileInfrastructure project focus on the technical side of it based on my first experience implementing MobileAssessment Management and Mobile Assessment for Utilities.

Author: Alvaro M. Guzmán A.

Company: SAP Multi Country Latin America MCLA

Created on: September 13th 2009

Author BioI'm Alvaro Guzmán and I’ve been working in SAP LA since 2007 as a CRM consultant. My mayor skills arefocused in web development areas like CRM IC, CRM Web UI, UCES, BSP, WS and Java Webcomponents.

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw-mobile








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Beginning with an MI projectA few months ago I had the opportunity to participate in my first Mobile project and I decided to share withyou my experiences. To start I must confess that I am a Java/ABAP web developer with no formal training onMobile Infrastructure solutions but even though our project finished with a happy ending. In this particularcase I participated as a developer for Mobile Assessment Management (MAM) and Mobile AssessmentManagement for Utilities (MAU) implementations and that is the reason why this paper will be focused on thetechnical part of them.

But what do we know about these two? At a glance, both applications help the technicians of amaintenance/service company to retrieve and display work orders and tasks in a PDA. They provide all thenecessary information for technicians to work completely offline, which improves their work efficiency sincethey don’t need to communicate with the center of operations at all.

Here you can see a self explaining graphic of a standard process:

If you translate this figure into common day activities it would be something like this: At the beginning of theday the backend server creates and assigns the corresponding work orders to the available work teams.Those teams synchronize their PDAs in the morning and proceed to go out to the field to do their jobs.During the day, the technician goes to the indicated places in order to complete the orders they have in theirdevices and finally, at the end of the day, they synchronize again their PDAs in order to send all the datacollected to the backend system closing the process.

Below is a print screen of the standard solution for MAU, which runs in the PDA and was the canvas for ourenhancements:

Having gotten a brief idea of the MAM and MAU applications, we can start talking about the project.

The beginning of the realization phase was really hard for us mainly because of the lack of technicalexperience not only within our team but in the region, which adds that extra bit of pressure who nobodywants. Besides this, I have to tell you that it was a great experience and an excellent beginning for me in thiskind of applications: First of all, because of the outstanding team that I worked with and second because of





the satisfaction of seeing my work in a PDA in the middle of street, and being used by the technicians whofinally can tell you whether your effort was really worth.

I can start sharing my technical thoughts by saying that in addition to the coding, which is kind of straightforward once you got the idea of the communication objects used to send/receive data from the server(known as SyncBOs) and their handlers, you have to be aware all the time that your target should be a smallpiece of hardware with very limited resources. I can hear you saying : “Of course, everyb ody knows that”, butbelieve me, that is nothing compared with the experience of running the application the first time in the PDAwith the data that is supposed to be used on the field day by day … it took forever to synchronize it! Now is agood moment to explain that the synchronization is nothing more that the process where all the data is sentto the PDA from the server and vice versa. But no worries, eventually we solved the problem (keep onreading and find out how!).

About the PDAs: They are like children (if you allow me the comparison) who cannot handle much weightand do not have the reasoning necessary to deal with tough problems. What is that supposed to mean?Technically speaking we have less than 100 Mbs of RAM, a 625 Mhz processor and a JVM compatible withJava version 1.1… sounds like fun isn’t?

Deeply, both MAM and MAU are Web Applications that are deployed in a Servlet container installed in thePDA and they run in a Web Browser. For those of you who knew something about mobile applicationsplatforms design and style, you can immediately notice that this is not the best approach because we have aweb server running in the device that is actually responding to requests from just one client: The server itself.I must say that after having been struggling with this implementation for a while we heard something aboutan AWT (Abstract Window Toolkit) solution which sounds more logical for this kind of implementation since itis just a Java stand alone application which can run faster and do not need to use a web container.Unfortunately we were in the middle of realization phase so it was kind of late for the change (no regrets sofar). If you take a look at this graphic of the architecture of a Mobile solution you’ll see my point about thecurrent approach:

As you can see, in each device we have the SAP MI Client installed which in this case is comprised by aServlet container (Tomcat), local database (DB2) and the administration web application: Yes, that is thestandard approach.

Nonetheless, no matter the adversities or failures, we continued our jobs and finally our developmentsstarted to work as expected: A couple of standard views updated at the beginning, a few another new onescreated and finally but not least, a couple of Web Services executed and our own SyncBOs used. Not badisn’t?







Related ContentFor more information, visit the Mobile homepage .









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Beginning With an MI Project