Can you use third party .dlls in SAPUI5?

Question

I am redesigning a Reman service, which currently exists as a thick client application that receives SAP Optimization Jobs (from SAP), calculates the best way to optimize product use (Optimizer) and display the best optimization on the client. They can either edit or submit the optimization back to SAP

I am trying to create a SAPUI5 application that either:

• Reaches out to an external web server to run a small application (Optimizer) and returns the data back to the UI5 application.
• or
• Load the third party dll into SAP UI5 and call the Optimizer that way.

Is this possible? Can you use third party dlls in UI5?

Answer 1

SAPUI5 - as the name says - is a UI framework. From your description, I understand that you're trying to pull business/processing logic into the UI. This is usually considered a bad idea. You should rather put the business logic (i. e. your optimizer) into a server-side component (anything that would ideally provide OData services) and use UI5 to create a front-end for that.

Answer 2

It appears that in both solutions you proposed, the business logic is on the server, which is a good practice.

Although it isn't impossible to call a DLL from Javascript, it isn't a very good idea, because there is no possibility to make this browser-independent. There may even be incompatibilities between various versions of the same browser when calling DLLs.

It would by far be the preferred way to call the optimizer webservice from the UI5 application. In fact, UI5 is completely designed to facilitate calling web-services and provides various components that will help you to make the actual call and bind the returned data to user-interface controls.

Answer 3

it is possible as long you have the dll registered in the machine which is running the UI5 Application and you're using JScript for such.