Getting started with SAP River Rapid Development Environment (RDE) – Part 1
While SAPPHIRE NOW is usually more of a business-focused event there sure were some treats announced for the technical people out there, one of them being the new web-based Rapid Application Development tool with the name: SAP River Rapid Development Environment (or RDE, for short – yes, SAP has a tradition for three-letter acronyms…) Some may consider it to be the successor of the never released AppDesigner (here‘s the background story), others may think of it as the big brother of the existing Web IDE that is part of SAP HANA). Be it as it may…
Yaad Oren has done a great job of setting the stage and providing a high-level overview in his respective blog post The Simple Way to Build and Extend SAPUI5 Applications, so in case you want to get up to speed with RDE first please read his post. Me, I’d rather get right at it and walk you through the first steps to get your hands dirty. Let’s do this…
Setting up RDE
Before you can get started you need to subscribe to RDE and configure the required HTTP destination as documented here: SAP River RDE Developer Guide. However, knowing that developers are not widely known to consult the documentation up front I mentioned it explicitly here. (BTW, you do also need to have a registered developer account on our trial landscape to try out this BETA feature. If you do not have an account yet, please register here – it takes no more than 2 minutes!)
Subscribing to RDE
Before you can actually use RDE you have to subscribe to it. For this purpose go to your trial account dashboard and click on the ‘Subscriptions‘ entry on the left-hand navigation menu. Then, click on ‘New Subscription…‘, which will open a pop-up dialog providing you with two choices (see attached screenshot). Select the top entry ‘rde‘ and then click on ‘Create‘.
Now, you should see an ‘rde‘ entry within the list of your subscriptions. Click on it to get to a detailed view. Now, you should see something similar to the following screenshot. (In case you haven’t guessed – the red square symbol indicates that RDE is not yet properly configured!)
In order to fix this we’ll have to create a so-called HTTP destination that provides RDE with a link to the required SAPUI5 distribution. (Sure, that’s a bit tedious and eventually this won’t be necessary anymore once RDE is maturing out of BETA status.)
Maintaining the UI5 destination
In the left-hand navigation menu is an entry called ‘Destinations‘ (which sounds to be the right location to create the needed destination). Let’s click on this entry and maintain the two required HTTP destinations mentioned in the respective chapter of the getting started guide.
If we now go back to the ‘Subscriptions‘ menu and our ‘RDE’ subscription respectively (as explained above) we should now see a green circle instead of the previous red square. Hooray! Yes, now it’s the time to click on the RDE link…
GIT settings
The first thing you should once you launch RDE for the first time is to navigate to the ‘Tools‘ menu and then to select the ‘Git settings‘ sub-menu. This will open a pop-up dialog asking for your git settings. Important: Please enter your email address you used to register for your trial account! For the vast majority this should be the same email address used to register for SCN (aka SDN) back in the days. Your ‘Git User Name‘ is your P- or S-user (or for SAP employees or contractors your I/D/C-user ID).
In the upcoming part 2 of this mini series I’ll explain how-to create a simple UI5-based “Hello World” application and get into details about the GIT versioning system and how-to deploy apps to SAP HANA Cloud Platform. The impatient however should be ready to explore on their own following these tutorials on the SAP HANA Academy YouTube channel.
PS: And just for the record… of course, I’ve been among those that never consulted the documentation during my first encounter with RDE and hence learned all the above the hard way. 😉
Wow a real "modern" development environment delivered by SAP. Looks very promising.
Hi,
Although everything looks fine (destinations are green / OK) when I start RDE (I'm using Chrome) using the URL in the Subscriptions page, I get an empty page.
Suggestions?
D.
Hi Rich,
hm... no clue. Are you referring to this link?
Should work fine! Can you send me your link and eventually the HTML source code of teh page you get? (Did you check the network traffic? Any clues there?)
BR,
matthias
The git stuff is still not working for me (and colleagues). In fact in the instructions above you specify to select the Tools -> GIT menu but then you show the dialog that is from the Tools -> Git Settings menu.
Above you specify to use our p-number username whereas with other conversations I've had and the online help it says to enter your full name here....
Hi Jason,
I feel your pain and appreciate your interest. I'm afraid there's a small bug in regards to the Git functionality. AFAIK, the team is working on a fix already... please stay tuned!
Best regards,
matthias
Hi Jason,
the sole purpose of the user name and email is to define your identity for Git. They are used with every commit operation and are actually part of the commit itself to identify the author of the commit. So, it does not really matter what values you provide as long as they identify you and are consistently used by you.
Kind Regards,
Christian
Hi Christian,
as far as we know the email address must be the one you entered as email address for your SCN account. If this is not the case, your commit will be rejected because of Invalid Committer when pushing.
Best regards
Silke
Hi Jason, The issue with "Deploy on HANA Cloud Platform" was fixed.
Please just assure that your GIT settings are maintained. We are working on proper user notification if this setting is missing. It might be also that you have to create a new project to ensure a proper deploy - sorry for this inconvenience ... and don't be surprised that the "Deploy" remains active during processing. Do not push more often but be patient till the pop-up vanishes. We are also working on this 🙂 .
Hi ,
Tried Creating a Empty SAP UI5 Mobile project and run it. But getting the following Error ""
I did not modify any code. Generally we get this error when the application is not deployed in server properly.Request your help. Thanks in Advance.
Hi,
please ensure that you follow all steps in the Getting Started - from the error it seems that rdetesting is not yet subscribed. In chapter Subscribing to the SAP River RDE you see that also rdetesting needs to be subscribed (please keep that name for the subscription).
Best regards
Silke
Hi Arians,
Thanks a lot solved the problem after rdetesting is subscribed as per the suggestion.
Kind Regards,
LakshmiKishore
Hi,
I wonder how SAP River and SAP River RDE are related. On the first glimpse, they look nearly identical, and of course, they share (almost) the same name. However, SAP River seems to be a backend/OData development tool, while SAP River RDE aims to be a template-based WYSIWYG-/Drag&Drop-UI-editor.
I did not find any official statement or link between the two tools
This is something I'm also asking. I see no connection between a (backend) RDL model and the RDE environment, as in being able to build your app on an RDL model and have your entities/services automatically generated.
In RDE, you can easily create an RDL file (as you can create "any" file type), but it does not seem to "do" much. The entities/actions etc. defined in the RDL model cannot be accessed/viewed in RDE.
Maybe this is being worked on?
Regards,
Trond
Hi, I've created a RIVER backend application and now want to create a RIVER RDE application for the front-end. How to connect the RIVER RDE to the backend generated OData services?
Thanks in advance.
Kind regards,
Bart
Hi Bart,
Did you configure a destination connecting through the HANA Cloud Connecto for your back-end? If not, please check the following link:
Connecting Remote Systems
Thanks very much for your reply Margot. Indeed I already checked this. Actually I don't connect to an ABAP backend system, but HANA with the RDL application. In the guide these steps are applicable for connection to an ABAP system right?
In the guide: "You can setup HANA cloud connector and establish a connection to ABAP backend systems"
I'll check the next also:
SAP HANA Cloud Platform
Hi,
I would like to know if it is possible to connect to an on premise HANA system through this is setup. As the document mentions only about establishing a connection to ABAP backend system, I am really confused. Could anyone please clarify this?
What would be the properties parameters that I need to enter while creating the destinations if this is possible?
Thanks,
Ajith Cheruvally
Hi Ajith,
To configure on premise HANA system you need to set the RDEUsage property with value ‘river’
Lidor
Hi,
I already created a discussion thread on this topic but it is unfortunately unanswered.
D.
Hi Matthias,
Thanks for the blog. The title should probably be something like "Documentation for people who don't read documentation"
I've seen today that instead of "Tools->GIT" (which doesn't do anything for me) there is an entry "Tools->Git Settings" where I can put the mail.
Thanks Yariv for pointing that out! You're correct... it's "Git settings" indeed. Updated the post accordingly.
Hey Matthias,
thanks for this, looks really good so far
FYI - Part 2 is now out: Getting started with SAP River Rapid Development Environment (RDE) - Part 2
Hi,
I try to follow this tutorial, but clicking the link to RDE directs my to a funny problem: I get redirected to my local computer, for authentication purposes.
What am I doing wrong?
Edit: for a better visualization I added an extract of the request sequence.
Hello,
I still encounter a problem setting up the GIT parameters in RDE. After I have created a HTML5 application in the HCP cockpit I try to clone the repository in RDE (File->Git->Clone repository, I use the Git-URL which is given after the HTML5 project is created). And whatever username/PW combination (SCN user, SCN user + trial suffix) I use the result is always the following error:
Any ideas on this ?
Kind regards,
Gerald Sauerwein
Hi Gerald,
This message appears when the credentials are wrong.
The user name and password should be your SCN username and password without any modifications.
Regards,
Lidor
Hi Lidor,
thanks for your reply. I already had put the River topic to rest because the environment did not work properly for me. I knew that this error was authorization related and I tried many combinations of uname/password. Today I gave it another try - your proposal (SCN uname and PW) did not work - again. Then I tried my e-mail address as uname and the SCN PW - and that was successful 🙂 I do not want to know how my masterdata record at the SAP ID service looks like...
Anyhow, only the result counts, thanks again for giving me the push back to the topic !
Kind Regards,
Gerald.
I noticed that Version 1.0.2 came around,
but I still encounter my problem:
For what reason does the RDE service assume that I'm running an identity provider locally?
Maybe you have changed Local Service Provider settings in your HCP account from Default to another one.
Thanks Roman,
that was my problem. I'm playing around occasionally with the trial account to check out the newest Betaware, and wasn't aware that I changed the Trust settings months ago.
Kind regards, Stephan
Hi Matthias,
Thanks for your post..
Does SAP has come up with any guidelines or best practices for source code management of River? I know that GIT has the generic best practices, just wondering may be SAP has come up its own best practices.
Kind regards,
Muttanna
Hi,
As we were doing some ramp up activities on RIVER RDE ,we found couple of posts from Matthias which were extremely helpful. In this part only he has given reference for "RDE Developer Guide" where there are sections for version controlling.
http://marketplace.saphana.com/medias/Getting-Started-with-River-RDE-Beta?context=bWFzdGVyfHJvb3R8MjE4NDc0NnxhcHBsaWNhdGlvbi9wZGZ8aDBkL2g2NS84Nzk4OTgzMDI4NzY2LnBkZnwwYjRjNzljOWFhNGM2M2IxYjNmMTc2ZDUwZWRjOTU0MmU5NTFiZGM4ZDk5OWI0YTg5ODVhMzM5ZDIwMDQ5ZDky
Hi,
I've created destination as you explain. But when I open rde subscription I get "No destination required" in the part of Referenced Destinations
Why it could be so?
Best regards
Irina
Hi Irina,
This is totally fine. There had been some changes in the SAP River RDE set-up, so ui5dist is no longer needed. That's why it's no longer listed there.
When you click on the Application URL in view area Active Version you should be able to launch SAP River RDE properly.
Regards, Margot
Good day,
Thank you for a very informative article.
I have followed you instructions but on creating a new project with River my catalogue drop down is empty. My Reference Destination status is also still red.
Any suggestions.
Thanks,
Daniel
Hi,
after letting my RDE session expire in Chrome , I now get this curious error:
Can anyone give me a hint on this?
Thanks, Stephan
Hi Stephan,
yesterday we had some technical issues here, but now it is working again.
Best regards
Matthias
Hello Team,
I have created an extension project in the River RDE internal account and trying to deploy it back to our ABAP UI5 Repository. It throws authorization error for 'Create/Deploy' (Attached is the below snapshot for your reference). Though e tried providing SAP_ALL (for time-being) for the user in R/3 system, it is of no use. Is there a bug while deploying back to UI repository? as Deploying to SAP HANA Cloud works perfectly fine.
Kindly helps us to resolve this error.
Regrads,
Shyam Sunder
Hello Shyam,
the password for logging on to the ABAP system is not necessarily your SAP_ALL pasword. Have you verified it against the ABAP system directly?
Please open the Chrome developer tools (F12) and retry the upload. Then check the network trace for the failed request and give me the response data.
Best regards
Matthias
Hi Matthias,
Thank you for your quick help.
In the meanwhile we detected that RFC authorizations were missing for the user and the deployment functionality is now woring fine.
Many Thanks.
Regards,
Shyam Sunder
Hello Team,
I have by mistake press the unsubscribe button for "rde" into the SAP HANA cloud platform "Subscription" tab. So now i can not able to see any entry for "rde" when i click on "New Subscription".
Kindly let me know how i can get this back into my HANA cloud trial version.
Many Thanks,
Mithun
Hi Mithun,
due to the renaming to SAP Web IDE the old application name rde has been deprecated and you are no longer able to subscribe to it.
The new name is webide from provider account sapwebide. This application is meanwhile subscribed to your account automatically.
Best regards
Matthias
Thanks Matthias,
now i can able to enter into the webide....
Thanks a lot for you helpful reply......
Regards,
Mithun
Push code in RDE
Hi All, Can any one please tell me the steps to push my code using RDE.
Thanks & Regards,
Priya
Hi Matthias,
I had a problem to consume the gwaas services in sap ui5 applications
Denise Nepraunig has suggested you for this problem.
below is the url for my post
please help out to solve this.
Regards,
Raghu Nookala
Hi Ragu,
I am not able to answer this as I have no knowledge about GWAAS. Only the experts can answer. Actually their infrastructure should be able to support app2appSSO but that's a guess.
Regards Matthias
Hi Matthias,
Thanks for response,
your guess is correct
Thanks one more time.
Regards
Raghu
Hi raghavendra - truly sorry for not replying earlier, but I've been out on an extended vacation and then all the SCN notifications where at the bottom of my overflowing inbox.
Fortunately I can see that you have been helped in the meanwhile... kudos to the community & thanks to Vinay.
Cheers,matthias
PS: ... and shout-out to Denise for connecting the dots 😉
Hi Matthias,
Hi,
this naming is quite outdated. A year ago RDE has been renamed to SAP Web IDE. You should be able to find this. The testing subscription is no longer needed.
More information can be found here: SAP Web IDE Developer Guide
Regards Matthias