As a fellow student at my university is starting his diploma thesis on Visual Composer in connection with Enterprise Portal (EP), Business Intelligence (BI) and R/3, here a really short summary as well as the most important links.

“SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer allows you to compose model-based business applications in a flexible way — without manual coding.” (Source: sap.com)

As my graphic from the previous post shows, Visual Composer (VC) is in the context of enterprise SOA used for development of user interfaces. Model-based here really means that you create visual model items on the Visual Composer storyboard and link them by a line to create mappings between items. The model is saved in an XML format. When you deploy it to the server the respective code is generated. This has the big advantage that you are independent of UI technologies. You can define in the deployment options which output should be generated. Currently there exist options for Web Dynpro and Flash/Flex but of course more options might be added over time.

I really like the way the VC works. Compared to other SAP tools it is very handy and concise. For example you can just drag&drop your layout items (like forms and tables) from the sidebar onto the storyboard. Or in case you drop out from a data service a context menu opens which lets you choose an item by which the result should be displayed. The big disadvantage of VC is that as the code is generated automatically you have no chance to add own coding in case Visual Composer does not offer a certain functionality. Of course, VC is thought to be for business analysts or business process experts but in case they would need more functionality or different layout items programmers can’t help out. So if the functionality of Visual Composer is not enough for a certain project, all you can do is to switch to Web Dynpro freestyle development with NetWeaver Developer Studio.

I already mentioned data services. Visual Composer is not just about user interface design. In fact you can model whole applications. Visual Composer offers different connectors to data services. So there is a BI connector, JDBC connector, Web Service connector and so forth.

So once you have defined the connection parameters for your data service, you can drag&drop a specific service operation/query on your storyboard just like normal UI elements. In case the service needs input you place for example a form in front of it where the user can type in the required data, after the service you place for example a table where the output is diplayed. Especially for the use with BI there exist a lot of different graphical elements such as pie charts, gauge etc.

You can also define different layers in your model and the transition between layers. So for example you type in your data in the form, click the submit button, the form disappears and instead the result shows up in the table. For this transition there exist different possibilities which can easily configured, for example a wizard style (which shows the steps involved), tab style (so when you click on the second tab you see the table) and many more.

The output you generate with Visual Composer is an iView or page which is deployed to the portal environment. There you can use it like every other element created directly in the portal. But like my graphic from the previous post shows you can also use the VC element as one step in a bigger process and add it as a callable object to Guided Procedures where you define roles for the process step.

To bring output from SAP Business Warehouse (BW) into the portal, the BI connector is needed. I just worked with web services so far but I assume it is the same with BI querys. To access the R/3 you probably have to connect via BAPIs, iDocs or RFCs. Maybe the xAPP Analytics might be of interest as well. I don’t know it in detail but as it is a product I assume that a lot of scenarios are already modeled ready for use and can be adapted if needed.
The best resource for Visual Composer is the Visual Composer section at SDN. There are a lot of documents, including links to how-to guides, to the VC forum and VC Blogs. The Visual Composer Modeler’s Guide might be a good start.

And of course, there is the first Visual Composer book coming out in a few days.

Categories: SAP enterprise SOA