What is the state of DOE?

[Former Member]

Does anyone in the community have experience of building a custom SUP application using DOE?

Is anyone able to offer some insight into the current state of DOE such as:

• current version,
• is it an Add-on to NetWeaver 730 with EHP1
• does one need NW 731
• Is it possible to install a single NW731 instance to support both DOE and NW Gateway 2.0

Generally, I am interested in discussing what is the optimal ingrastructure for customers seeking a mobility stragegy to support both online apps (through Gateway) and offline apps/mission critical apps through DOE?

Sergio

[masa_139]

It depends on what kind of custom app you are going to develop and what kind of platform functions are required for building the custom app.

SUP is the main mobile platform and both offline and online apps can be developed on SUP platform.

1. SUP

Example: SAP Retail Execution. Both offline and online usages are supported. Complex distribution rule is not required in the business scenarios.

2. SUP + NetWeaver Mobile(DOE)

Example: SAP CRM Sales. Both offline and online usages are supported. Complex distribution rules are delivered in standard. Customer can enhance the distribution model. Data will be changed in both CRM backend and devices. Queue messaging and conflict resolution handling are provided in NetWeaver Mobile.

3. SUP + NetWeaver Gateway

Example: Timesheet, Travel Expense Report, etc. Online access only simple apps. Gateway gives oData channel.

Regarding SUP + NetWeaver Mobile, the Sybase SAP Connector is a part of SUP. It supports only NetWeaver Mobile 7.1 (No EhP1 and No 7.3).

[SergioFerrari]

Interesting question Sergio.

I think DOE is still current and used by three standard SAP Apps (have a look to the wiki page SAP Mobile Store Apps).

I'm wondering why SAP Retail Execution has not adopted it while it's clear that when SAP NetWeaver Gateway is used DOE seems not part of the game.

I believe DOE has great value in case of complex synchronization rules and delta records to be computed comparing massive data.

It seems a good idea to use it from the technical point of view but it's another piece of the puzzle to be deployed, managed and configured/programmed.

Sergio

[Former Member]

Thank for the WikiLink Sergio. Useful!!

Is there a way of inviting John Moy into this discussion?

You are absolutely correct, DOE still offers a superior support for building enterprise grade applications (with SAP Backends) than SUP in its current form. The immediate benefit or DOE form my experience is its direct integration with the SAP backend.

- Whilst SUP supports 'push' from the backend through DCN (with or without payload), this can be impractical for large data sets. DOE provides flow control for bulk uploads 'our of the box'.

- With SUP, Distribution rules are effectively hard wired and modled into the MBO diagram. Once deployed, this cannot be changed. DOE on the other hand allows developers to build the Data Object and distribution rules separately... and distribution rules can evolve over time.

These to me are key advantages over DOE. Hence why I am keen to know more about DOE and what the installation guid is for installing DOE for a client.

Sergio

[SergioFerrari]

I'm with you and I tweeted to involve Former Member - we'll see

[former_member182638]

Hi Guys,

Sadly I am no expert with DOE, and probably we need an SAP person to weigh in on the discussion.  What I do remember is seeing this architectural paper on SUP 2.1 earlier this year.  See page 13 where is says the following ...

The SUP DOE deployment option provides additional flexibility, allowing the system designer to model andconsolidate SAP mobile content in the middle tier and separately layer distribution rules over this content. Thisapproach is especially useful where back ends cannot provide a mobile interface that serves up mobile data, or whereadditional flexibility is required. This approach allows distribution rules to evolve separately from the content modeland for different distribution rule sets to be used with the same content model. Even customers can change the rules without rewriting client or back-end code, after actively deploying applications.The technology to enable this behavior is built directly into the NetWeaver stack and is therefore best suited to SAP-only implementations or where third-party back-end integration is already provided through NetWeaver. This method specifies BAPI CRUD interfaces to adapt back-end suite datasources to the middleware data consolidation area.

So the architectural document for SUP2.1 still refers to DOE, but notice how it is termed 'SUP DOE'?  Page 16 refers to it as 'DOE as a component in SUP'.  Looks to me like this has moved across from NetWeaver branding to SUP branding (which I guess is now becoming SAP Mobile Platform branding).  I can only point you to the words in this document.  I don't have any other information other than what you see there.  As to how one obtains this runtime (or does it come out of the box with a SUP installation now?) I am unsure.  I hope somebody from SAP/Sybase weighs in and clarifies this.  I'll add a link to twitter to see if we can pick up more responders.

Regards

John

[Former Member]

Thanks for your feedback on this John.

What is clear is that DOE appears still to be in the minds of the Sybase engineers who are building the SUP products but information on how to build DOE applications is very scant!!

What makes things all the more frustrating is that, although DOE is still perceived to be a core component of SAP's mobility toolkit, there are no DOE training courses and the SUP training course SUP521 ... which i deliver.. has little mention of DOE in the course material. When I deliver the course, I normally take it upon myself discuss DOE in a little more detail however I am not aware of any formal training courses for this product.

Another frustrating point.. A colleague of mine @parkinsonsap brought to my attention this morning that SAP are still NetWeaver Mobile as a mobility product and the current release is 731 (which i assume is related to NetWeaver 730 EHP1). I thought NetWeaver Mobile was defunct!?!

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw73ehp1/helpdata/en/bc/20471879ad4ceda7a17d007353178e/content.htm

Interestingly the help.sap.com link mentions a location for the NW Mobile 731 inst guide but the link doesn’t work

So I ask the question again?!? What is the current state of DOE! It all seems to be so mysterious.

[hofmann]

The current state of DOE is that it's part of SAP Mobile Platform and you need it to run SAP apps.

The problem with DOE is that you'll need 7.10 and a rather old architecture with DOE-C and mobile gateway. It is also notable that EOL for NW MI 7.10 was extended more than once to now 2020. If I'm not totally wrong making it one of few (if not the only) NW 7.1 product that will be supported that long. Will be fun opening messages in 2019 for MI 7.1.

On the paper DOE has nice features like device rules and syncing large numbers of requests. Documentation not always matches reality. Using SUP as a middle ware server for DOE based MBOs is increasing costs without offering much benefit. I'm waiting for JCo MBOs that allow for some more flexible modelling. As long as this won't be realized: the state of DOE is as stated above: part of SAP Mobile Platform.

Short: you'll have to use it.