1. Deployment: Component Overview
ASC has quite a few components and repositories. We have grouped the "core" components into a single repository to make it as simple as possible to get started.
The core repository includes the Admin UI, Server/API backend, Portal UI and ASC UI5 SDK. We have additional optional SDK's if you would like to include ASC in your native iOS or Android Applications.
The Admin UI is a SAP UI5 web application allowing Admins, App Owners and Developers to manage and maintain applications, contacts and knowledge base data for each of the applications. The Admin UI can also be used by 1st level support to lookup contacts, developers, review release notes and provide support to end users.
The Server or backend component provides a REST API for the Admin UI and the various SDK's to interact with the database. The server uses Postgres for data entity storage and the file system for icons and other application related artifacts. At SAP we use Jamf as our iOS MDM, we have included various integration hooks with Jamf in the Admin UI and server allowing our app developers to push new releases through ASC rather than needing admin access to Jamf directly, supporting our DevOps model.
The Portal UI is a very simple web application which displays the support information in a single webpage. This can be used when developers do not want to include one of the SDK's in their source code but would still like end-users to have a "Help Portal". This portal displays the application description, help, release notes, application contacts for support, any announcements and other pertinent application details.
The UI5 SDK is a file which provides a ASC help popup in your custom UI5 applications. The SDK is written as a module which can be included in a button press event and will display the help, release notes, app contacts and any announcements which are listed in the Admin UI.
The iOS SDK is a drop in SDK allowing developers to include a ASC help popup to be displayed in a custom iOS application. Please see the relevant repo for more information on installation.
The Android SDK is a drop in SDK allowing developers to include a ASC help popup to be displayed in a custom Android application. Please see the relevant repo for more information on installation.