Dear Folks,
This is second consecutive time being Most Valuable Professional (MVP) on ESRI Forums. I take this opportunity to thank all those who have clicked ‘this post answered my question’ .
Thanks to all my team members, collegues, friends and organisation , for their support and encouragment throughout.
There are some active discussion going on some of social network sites on SAP-GIS Integration. I am also one who look for some specific information on integration of these two systems. I have searched continously and got some information which are useful for someone like me. The GIS group in Larsen and Toubro (LNT) Infotech, Mumbai and TCS working on this integration. You can download their paper (won prize in ESRI) titled “DEVELOPMENT OF GIS-SAP INTERFACE FOR VALIDATION OF GEO-CODED ADDRESS” explains about application developed for electric utility company. “The GIS application was developed as a multi-threaded component implemented in the COM Model. The Arcobjects toolkit from ESRI forms the core of the component. SAP’s COM4ABAP software has been used as the middleware”. This is one example. ESRI has provided some docs on integration. Here is list of some documents/paper for getting started.
1. GIS Best Practices : Using GIS and SAP , June 2007, ESRI
2. Technology Update : ESRI Internation User Conf 2005, ESRI SAP User group meeting
3. SAP/GIS Integration: Observation and practices by Stever Burner of ESRI
4. SAP Netweaver: ESRI-SAP competency centre, Europe (Good Document)
5. SAP Exchange Infrastructure (XI) by Carsten Pipel (Good document)
6. SAP Business data visualization with Map Objects (Year, 1999: Outdated one)
7. GIS and beyond Looking to SAP through the Ge0-Window: Belgian water Utility, Pidpa
8 . Tacoma Economic Development: GIS Diversity, Address and 3D visualization (2004 paper)
9. MDM for SAP-GIS Integration: from SAP Labs (Good doc)
10. Map4SAP: An ArcGIS Solution for SAP : Peter Wikinson , ESRI (UC 2007)
11. Mapping Data in SAP-Business Ware House: Mark T.Schnur, M.S.
12. Mapping SAP-BW Data
and many more documents available in internet for further reading.
In general, SAP systems are very costly and resources are also scarce. Most of pure GIS companies in India are medium level companies hence affordablity to SAP system is void. Big gaints can make use of GIS (Mapping) potentials to their existing system(SAP).Most of integration has been taken place with respect to ESRI Products. Open source GIS integration with SAP is also another viable option.
Any comments/suggestions are welcome!.
Long back I have also faced problem of images not being loaded in some of my machines which runs my MapObjects application. ImageLayer.Valid() method returns false in some occassions. I tried to find exact cause or probable causes for the issue. After giving enough try and searching forum, I learnt it may cause due to improper installation of MapObjects and it was suggested to MoRuntime.exe for avoiding these sorts of issue. This solution is helpful for few, but in mycase I couldnt figure the root cause. There is some internal issue with MO on loading this image predominatley in loading TIF format. ESRI should support major issues like this atleast!
Recently Brendan Lee & Maarten VanDenBroek facing similar trail. Maarten has found a cause and probable workaround of this issue. ”We were able to determine that the client software for Oracle 10 was causing the problem (at least in our case). The Oracle software somehow interferes with the MapObjects software and prevents it from opening the image catalog and reading TIFF files. When we changed our application to intialize the GIS (loading the layers thus forcing it to load all its DLL’s) BEFORE loading the Oracle client software DLL’s, the problem went away”
I’m glad to see one workaround for this issue. This is good finding. The unique capabilities of Process Explorer make it useful for tracking down DLL-version problems or handle leaks, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.
It shows exactly which DLL’s are loaded by the EXE at any given point to study his problem. Tools like this will certainly helpful for developers like us to understand the what happens behind the scene.
ArcGIS Server 9.2 Service Pack 5 includes an enhancement to the ArcGIS Server Java ADF which provides support for IBM Portal Server ArcGIS Portlet development. This gives you the ability to create and publish GIS Mapping Portlets inside IBM Portal Server. In conjunction, SP5 includes a plug-in for the IBM Rational Application Developer (RAD) environment so that you can create and deploy those ArcGIS Portlets more efficiently. The following documents have been added related to this SP5 enhancement.
Developing ArcGIS portlet Applications in RAD
Will ESRI upload these plug-in s as zip file who don’t have internet connection. ESRI please awake!
Dear Folks,
Dave is conducting his 2008 Geospatial Developer Survey. If you’re a GIS developer, I highly encourage you to complete it!
MapObjects 2.2 was designed, tested, and supported for use with Visual Studio .NET (from 2002), which uses the .NET Framework v1.0. Unfortunately, it is not supported for use with Visual Studio 2005, which uses the .NET Framework v2.0. It may just work, but we have not tested it. For one, the MapObjects installer only knows how to look for the version 1.0 GAC, so at a minimum, you would have to do part of the installation manually, depending on how comfortable you are with modifying the development environment and the .NET framework.
Even the most recent version of MapObjects-Windows Edition, version 2.4 does not support Visual Studio 2005.
It is unfornuate that ESRI will end MapObjects Supports soon and discontinue the product.
Jim Barry of ESRI writes “We are sorry to report that free copies of MapObjects software are no longer available for evaluation.”
ESRI highly recommends that you consider using ArcGIS Engine if you want to use embeddable mapping and GIS components in your application’s design. The easiest and least expensive way to get the ArcGIS Engine developer kit is to subscribe to the ESRI Developer Network. More information here:
http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/edn/index.html
Great product from ESRI finally ends in peace. I love MapObjects!
Build 722 = ArcGIS Desktop 9.1 final
Build 750 = ArcGIS Desktop 9.1 Service Pack 1
Build 780 = ArcGIS Desktop 9.1 Service Pack 2
ArcGIS Desktop 9.1 Service Pack 2 displays as build 766 from ArcMap Help > About ArcMap.Build 1324 = ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 final
Build 1332 = ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 Service Pack 1
ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 Service Pack 1 displays as build 1324 from ArcMap and ArcCatalog Help > About ArcMap/ArcCatalog.Build 1350 = ArcGIS 9.2 Service Pack 2
ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 Service Pack 2 displays as build 1324 from ArcCatalog Help > About ArcCatalog.Build 1380 = ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 Service Pack 3
Build 1420 = ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 Service Pack 4
Build 1450 = ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 Service Pack 5
ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 Service Pack 5 still displays as build 1420 from ArcCatalog Help > About ArcCatalog.Finally ESRI has made Eclipse plug-in for debugging ArcObjects Code. This is great news for java devlopers who uses print line statements. One of the most important aspect of any tool is debugging.I strongly feel that Mircosoft products brings great developer productivity. This is also one of reasons why many huge fans for MS products than java. Its better late than never, ESRI shown some concern to java developers!. Kudos ESRI 
About the plug-in
One of the most valuable tools that developers have at their disposal is a debugger through which they can step through code one statement at a time and inspect objects in the application. As many of you may already know, Java classes in the ArcObjects API are really only proxies to underlying COM ArcObjects. As a result, examining these proxies in the debugger only reveals their internal details and not the state of the ArcObjects. This makes it difficult to find out information such as the coordinates of a geometry, or the layers in a map service. Consequently, developers have to sprinkle their code with System.out.printlns and analyze traces on the console to get this information. This approach can be inconvenient and time consuming.
With this new Eclipse plug-in, Java developers can examine the state of the underlying ArcObjects right in Eclipse IDE’s Debug Perspective by enabling the “Show Logical Structure” option on the Expression and Variables window. Here’s an example of a Point object without the “Show Logical Structure” option enabled.
This information provides little insight into the underlying ArcObject and is not helpful in reasoning through a workflow while debugging. Now here’s the logical representation of the same object with the “Show Logical Structure” option enabled.
The logical representation presents more comprehensible information about the underlying ArcObject’s state. This state is defined by the no-argument getter methods on it. You might sometimes see exception messages like “Exception Occurred: com.sun.jdi.InvocationException occurred invoking method” in the logical representation. This is normal and happens when some property of the ArcObject is not valid in the current context of the application.
The underlying ArcObjects could be running remotely in a separate process as in the case of ArcGIS Server web applications, or in the same process like in ArcGIS Engine applications. Thus, both Engine and Server developers can take advantage of this plug-in to debug their applications.
Follow these steps to download and install the plug-in from the EDN Website:
