SAP Service and Asset Manager is primarily an offline application, which allows its mobile client to fully function while disconnected from network. For certain functionalities, online features are provided in SAP Service and Asset Manager, such as the part search feature. This feature allows the application to support the business requirement to allow user to find real-time part and inventory information from SAP back-end system. The user can still search part info using offline mode. However, for real-time info, users can switch to online search mode.
Online versus offline request
Online features and offline features must use different OData services:
OData services for online and offline Features
Feature | SAP Business Technology Platform Mobile Services Destination | SAP Gateway Technical Service |
|---|---|---|
Offline | DEST_SAMnnnn_PPROP | /MERP/SAP_ASSET_MANAGER_nnnn |
Online | DEST_SAMnnnn_ONLINE_PPROP | /MERP/SAP_ONLINE_LOOKUP_EXT_nnnn |
MDK metadata is largely agnostic to the service type (online or offline), there is major difference how OData service requests are handled by MDK mobile client.
MDK client uses OData offline SDK to handle offline features. OData offline SDK uses SAP Gateway offline OData service to synchronize mobile client offline DB, which requires network connection during synchronization. Once synchronized, OData offline serves as a local OData service provider on the mobile client, without requiring network connectivity to the SAP back end. Mobile client requests handled by OData offline OData service offers significant better performance.
MDK client redirects online requests to SAP Business Technology Platform Mobile Services, which in turn calls SAP Gateway online OData service. Online service call returns up-to-date information from SAP back-end system, but doesn’t offer same performance and response time. It is also not suitable for download large volume of data using online request.
It is important to note that any data from the online service does not automatically get saved into the offline DB, and records cannot be "linked" across destinations/services. It is imperative that when combining offline and online functionality that the data is mirrored in such a way that inconsistencies do not arise. However, if the transaction is done entirely online (that is, the page data comes from an online source and the resulting OData transaction is executed on an online destination), this is not a problem.
In SAP Service and Asset Manager application, user must flip a switch on the Part Search screen, to control whether the application uses online search or offline search.