This blog contains experience gained over the years of implementing (and de-implementing) large scale IT applications/software.

Always Save a Copy of a SAP Note

You know what happens, you find a SAP note, make a note of it and then continue through your day.
Next day, you go back to that SAP note and instead you get:

Sorry SAP note is being updated

Nooooooo!

You should always save a copy of a SAP note. You can do this by downloading the PDF version of the note if you think the note is relevant to what you’re working on.
Downloading the PDF version of the SAP note means you will get a PDF file with the name of the file being just the note number.
That’s not really helpful if you download a lot of SAP notes in a day.

Instead, what you really need is a tool that allows you to automatically apply the SAP note title to the name of the downloaded PDF.

Well, it just so happens that my free Chromium extension for Google Chrome and the new Chromium based Edge browser, can do exactly that!

With the extension installed in your browser, simply right click a SAP note page and select “Power Notes Searcher -> Auto-save note as PDF”:

It is downloaded and named accordingly, even including the version of the SAP note in the file name:

It couldn’t be easier.
This is just one of many features in my free Chromium extension for Google Chrome and the new Chromium based Edge browser.

Downloading SAP Download Basket Contents in the Cloud on Linux

Scenario: You’ve made the move to the cloud.  You are about to install some SAP software on a new Linux server hosted in the cloud and you just need to get the installation media uploaded.
Except, you don’t want to have to start X-Windows or setup a specific Windows server just to do this.

You have two options to achieve this, you can either:
Upload the files from your local network using SFTP or SCP (maybe you have ExpressRoute or DirectConnect) and have a fast connection.

or

Why not just download them straight from your SAP download basket into the target server.
What’s the difference between the two?  Well, it depends on whether you’ve already got access to the installation media locally, or if you are intending to first download it locally from SAP, then upload it to your cloud hosted server.
This doesn’t make sense to download then re-upload to the cloud.
Therefore, here’s how you can download straight from your SAP download basket.

What you will need:
– A web browser on your local PC.
– A valid SAP S-user account.
– Disk space on a cloud hosted Linux server (I’m going to show you the Linux way).
– The cloud hosted server will need internet access.

Setup Download Basket:
Before we start downloading, you need to cleanup your download basket.
Go to https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/downloadbasket
Remove everything already in there that is not the items you want to download to the cloud hosted server.
The reason we must do this is because it’s difficult to know which items relate to which files in the download basket (you’ll see in a moment).
Now you can add the specific items you wish to download, into your download basket.
I’ve got two items:

Export Download Basket:
In the download basket click the “Export Links to Text File” button:

This will generate a text document which you can open on your PC called myDownloadBasketFiles.txt.

Open the text file using notepad:

I have 2 lines for the two items in my download basket.  I don’t know which is which.  I can suppose they are in order, but I don’t really know for sure.
Take the first line and log onto your cloud hosted Linux server as your preferred user.
Ping the softwaredownload.sap.com server using the Linux utility wget to make sure you can see the server.

> wget https://softwaredownloads.sap.com

A successful ping will show a HTTP error 401 and “Authorization failed“:

We have confirmed that our cloud hosted Linux server can see the SAP download server.
Switch to your target download directory (somewhere with disk space):

> cd mydownloadsdirectory

We now call wget again and pass the first item to download:

> wget –http-user=”[your s-user]” –http-password=”[your password]” [the first url] –output-document=1file.SAR

Adjust the command line above to put in your S-user account name and password.
You should also change the last parameter to give your file a name.

We have to guess that it is a SAR file.  Once it’s downloaded you can always re-name and test the extraction using “SAPCAR -tvf thefile.SAR”.

The wget utility will save the file in the current directory.
Repeat the same command line, changing the URL and the output document file, for each of the remaining items in the notepad text file of your download basket.

As you can see, using wget will allow you to script the download process so that you could schedule an overnight download of software.