SAP River Codejam Summary

As a developer & scrum master in the SAP River group, at SAP Labs Israel, I was really excited to be given the opportunity to conduct an SAP River code Jam in Eindhoven for the first time .Luckily, Yoram Hod, a solution expert who has successfully run quite a few code jams, joined me.

The event was over-booked. We even had two participants who crossed the border from neighboring Belgium (thanks for making the trip guys!!).

The great thing about SAP River, is how easy it is to learn the language.
Once you get introduced to the key constructs – entities and views (data model) and actions (business logic), it virtually teaches itself. It helps to know a bit about OData, the protocol by which SAP River applications are exposed to the outside world

We started off with our cloud-hosted, web-based development environment, on http://www.sap-river.com. It’s a really cool way to code in SAP River, because the IDE takes care of provisioning HANA for you, so you can be productive in a matter of minutes.

The first real challenge was figuring out how to access existing artifacts in SAP HANA. Participants wanted to know whether the scope of the SAP River application was limited to what is defined in the code. Fortunately, the answer is NO. With SAP River, it’s very easy to consume existing SAP HANA artifacts.
For example, by writing:

entity Stations as alias to sap.hana.catalog.NKA.FUELSTATIONS;

One creates an SAP River entity called “Stations” that refers to an existing table called “FUELSTATIONS” in schema “NKA”. Now you treat this as if it is natively defined SAP River entity.

For example, you can select from it:

let bigStations Select s.* from Stations as s Where s.pumpNumber > 10;

You can associate to it :

export entity GasPumps{

     element station: association to Stations;

}

you can pass it as a parameter to an action, and so on.

Of course, no Codejam is complete without food, and what wonderful food it was!. The cute cayennes filled with mozzarella deserve a special mention.

The second part of the session was focused on the HANA studio, the eclipse-based IDE for building applications on SAP HANA.

We provided participants with access to a HANA system, with a development user and a River plug-in. Once they had compiled the.rdl file (known as activation in SAP HANA terminology), participants could browse the SAP HANA catalog, to see the myriad of artifacts created by the River compiler – the tables, views, stored procedures etc.

The atmosphere throughout the event was great, and we had some good laughs. Special thanks to Twan for the very warm hospitality, and to Jan for the stickers (I promise to send you an I Love SAP River sticker in return).

I am looking forward to future successful and fun codejams in other corners of the world.