Web Reporting

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Web Reporting is a WebRFC application that enables Internet users to get immediate access to business information in the R/3 System.

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By placing URLs in Web pages, you can:

Offer reports to be started dynamically
Make pre-generated lists that are stored in report trees available for display
Allow users to browse report trees

Web Reporting also supports interactive reporting. You can:

Process standard interactive events initiated by the user to get more detailed information on subsequent screens
Set links to other Web pages or function modules

When a user clicks on a URL, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server passes the request to the SAP Internet Transaction Server (ITS), which communicates with the R/3 System by Remote Function Call (RFC).

On the R/3 side, the function module WWW_DISPATCH_REQUEST receives the request and calls the function module specified in the URL.

Development

SAP has designed tools that allow easy and consistent development (and customization) of WebRFC applications. These tools were used to develop WebRFC applications such as Web Reporting.

In WebRFC applications, HTML pages are not generated exclusively with ABAP code, but derived from templates stored separately in a database table. In addition to standard HTML tags, these templates contain placeholders that are replaced with data at runtime.

SAP delivers a number of standard HTML templates, but you can modify any of these or even create your own. Using any standard text editor or HTML authoring tool, you can (for example):

Display your own company logo
Set foreground and background colors
Change the order and alignment of placeholders

This ability to modify HTML templates allows you some freedom to adapt WebRFC applications, but it still does not go far enough, because the HTML code that replaces the placeholders is determined by the applications themselves.

To allow you to customize generated HTML code, WebRFC applications can load and use named attributes (parameters) for each template. The templates and template parameters used in WebRFC applications are stored in the following database tables:

WWWDATA (templates)
WWWPARAMS (template parameters)

When developing WebRFC applications, you can maintain the objects of both these tables with the following function modules:

WWW_HTML_MERGER
WWW_LOAD_TEMPLATE_ATTRIBUTES
WWW_LOAD_OBJECT_ATTRIBUTES

In practice, WebRFC applications support different types of Web objects, all of which can be stored in the database table WWWDATA. Types of data include:

HTML templates
Binary data (for example, graphics)
SAP Internet Transaction Server (ITS) files

WebRFC Template Syntax

SAP’s standard WebRFC templates are HTML documents, which can contain any HTML tags. You can modify these templates or create your own using any text editor or other Web authoring tool.

WebRFC template syntax is HTML syntax. The only difference is that WebRFC applications can define their own placeholders. You can replace these placeholders with generated HTML code by using the function module WWW_HTML_MERGER.

WebRFC applications can accept any string as a placeholder, but SAP recommends that you use HTML comments (for example, <!myplaceholder!> ) for the following reasons:

Using HTML comments minimizes the risk of strings chosen as placeholders also appearing as part of an HTML tag.
Since the exclamation mark identifies a comment, placeholders not replaced by data do not appear when the HTML document is viewed in a Web browser.

When you edit a template, please be aware of the following limitations on placeholders:

ABAP does not support data streams, so templates and generated HTML code are stored in tables that contain one column with a width of 255 characters. When you load a template into R/3, the line end characters (for example, carriage return and line feed) are used to break the template text into the table structure.
Placeholders that represent data more than 255 characters long should appear on separate lines. You can replace the whole line with generated HTML code.
Placeholders that represent data up to 255 characters long can appear on lines with other HTML tags, or even within a tag. If the resulting line is longer than 255 characters, the line is truncated.

Placeholders Used in WebRFC Applications

Placeholder	Description	Remarks
<!script!>	JavaScript (or similar) for modifying HTML pages dynamically.	Used to modify HTML pages dynamically. In interactive Web Reporting, contains functions that react to events.
!mimepath!	MIME type.	Path to graphics, images or other binary data.
<!text-nnn!>	Text symbol.	Used to insert text elements into a template.

If a placeholder is used within a string of HTML text, SAP has omittted the tag notation so that it reads more easily.

<image> src="/dir1/!mimepath!/img.gif">

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