Slipups & Limitations while Exposing S/4HANA Launchpad Content via Content Federation

SAP BTP Launchpad service could be used as a central point of access to SAP, custom-build and third-party applications and extensions there by leading to higher user productivity.

The Fiori content can be exposed to BTP launchpad manually or via Content federation. To know how S/4HANA launchpad content can be federated to BTP, check out this Tutorial on developers.sap.com. This is a detailed set by step process.

While I tried this , I stumbled upon couple of issue and had spend some time to figure out what’s wrong and that is what i want to share in this blog so as to help others in case they face they same issue. We will also look at some of the content federation limitations.

Issue 1: After all the steps performed as mentioned in the tutorial, i was able to see the Apps on the BTP Launchpad.. Super happy :)… the moment i click on one of the tiles, I got the blow screen

In the browser inspect tools I could see the below errors.

Solution: After spending some time looking for the issue, I figured that that Destination name in the Runtime destination that  created should not have underscore( ‘_’ ) and my destination was having one as shown below.

Remove the ‘_’  and save the destination again. Don’t forget to assign the renamed destination in Content provider settings also.

Issue 2: So now I removed the ‘_’ from the name and was hoping the issue to be resolved. This time I got the “Internal Server Error” as shown below.

Solution: This time I figured out that in addition to Not having any underscore in destination name , it also should not be in CAPITAL letters.

Change the destination name to small letters and save it. Again, don’t forget to assign the changed name in content provider settings.

And this time I was able to see the app running … 

In addition to above watch out, remember to check the following  as well:

General Properties in Runtime Destination:

Property	Value
sap-platform	ABAP
sap-client	The client number of the ABAP system. For example 100.
HTML5.DynamicDestination	Add this property and set its value to true when you are creating a destination for a dynamic tile.

Destination properties for SAP GUI for HTML

For a SAP GUI for HTML app, we need to add the following additional properties:

Content Federation Limitations:

Topic	Content Provider	Limitation
Exposed content	All	To integrate the exposed content, a single role, group, or catalog may not be assigned more than 3000 apps. Otherwise, you will not be able to create the content provider in the Provider Manager.
Shell plugins	All	Shell plugins that are assigned to a role from a remote content provider are not supported. The shell plugins are not part of the content exposed by the provider.
SAP Smart Business tiles	SAP S/4HANA	SAP Smart Business (SMB) tiles use OData calls to retrieve dynamic data and are therefore not supported when using direct access.
Web Dynpro ABAP apps that require SAP Business Client (NWBC)	SAP S/4HANA	When federating Web Dynpro ABAP apps that require SAP Business Client (NWBC) (CompatibilityMode=TRUE) cannot run using a Cloud Connector configured with a Virtual Host. In the Cloud Connector configuration, the value of the Virtual Host must be the same as the full URL to the host.

So, now we know the possible pit falls when exposing the S/4HANA content to BTP Launchpad and also the must have destination properties and Limitations of Federation.