Some Free Tools For xMII Consultants

As an xMII Consultant, one needs to deal with variety of technologies(viz web technologies(js, ajax,) , data manipulation(XML, XSLT), db(oracle,mysql,oracle, UDS), SAP and xMII.
So I'm giving links to some of the free tools that I use for developing composites usig xMII.

Notepad++ - One of the most useful tool for any developer. Its very handy and handles most of the programming language formats. Moreover one can add custom plugins to handle some customised tasks.

XML Marker - XML editing made easy for free.

Gliffy - Used for creating diagrams.

xMII enhanced BLS - SAP xMII Enhanced Logic Editor is an enhanced version of standard SAP xMII Logic editor that allows an xMII developer to debug and develop transactions as never before thought. Developed by Felix Jeyareuben, a really cool tool. But it might be violating the SAP terms(that's why they deleted his weblog on that.(Download it at your own risk).

Technical Specifications to xMII transaction - Technical Specifications to xMII transaction is a tool that auto-generates transactions in xMII directly from the technical specifications. The tool is designed in such a way that the transactions will work automatically and no additional efforts after generating the transactions are needed. This tools is also developed by Felix Jeyareuben.

HeidiSQL: HeidiSQL is a powerful and easy client for MySQL

Toad: The most powerful and free client for SQL.




Other tools that are good( but not free) are:

1. Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
2. Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition 2005 CD/DVD
3. SAP R/3 IDES 4.71 + Oracle Database 9.2.10+ Education License

and of course Grand Theft Auto 3

Hope this article is useful to you

SAP BW Certification Test Simulation

A Really Good Video for guys who wanna do some BW thingy
Wanna subscribe to Sap Insider?

Tweaking Schedulers in xMII

SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII) Business Logic Services includes its own scheduling service that allows you to execute transactions on different schedules.

• The Schedule Editor is used to set up all scheduled jobs.
• The Scheduler is used to view a schedule summary.

Schedulers can be used to perform the functions as defined by SAP but we can also use it to have a variety of other things.

Like when me and my teammate Rupesh were discussing about an MES simulation for a training demo, we were struck with the brilliant idea(;-)) of using scheduler to update the SQL table and display the values in LED. Now the LEDs(of the Grid) will be updated from a SQL table which is updated by a transaction.

What did we achieve

We achieved a grid which was somewhat like this.

The grid automatically changes according to the values in the SQL table. And yippie... we did simulated MES.

This is just a tweak that one can use to simulate some time bound action. I hope this also gives readers the idea to get the things done using schedulers. This is just for prototypes and shoudl not be used on real production environments.

What did we do?

• We created a table called stage_info using MySQL for simulating the stage activities. It has two columns:
• o LineID(alphanumeric)
• o Stage_ID (alphanumeric)
• o Stage_status(boolean)

• Another table line_info is created for holding the flag that whether the transaction is to be executed or not.
• o Line_id(alphanemric)
• o RunFlag(Boolean)

Here for the sake of simplicity, I'm using a Boolean value for stage_status(1 for in use and 0 for idle).

• We created a transaction which fulfils the following functionality.
• o First it will check the status of the flag for current line. If it is true then it will execute the rest of the transaction otherwise it will exit it.
• o reads the sql table and check the status of each stage and change the status of next stage and current stage.
• Then a scheduler is set to run for specific time interval and the transaction for this scheduler is set to the transaction that we created earlier.
• We created a columnlights grid with source as the field of the stage_status of stage_info table. Here we set the color context as
• o 1-Green
• o 0-Magenta

The refresh rate of the grid was set to 15 seconds.