Enhancing a standard Fiori app - a real life example Part 2

[roger_sainsbury]

This is a four-part blog:

1.    Introduction and Analysis of the standard oData Service

2.    Fiori enhancement approaches (this part)

3.    Fiori extension with the SAP Web IDE

4.    Extension of the standard oData Service

2                              Fiori enhancement approaches

There are numerous ways to change a Fiori app – these are the options we considered.

2.1                          Customising

Some Fiori apps have customizing available in SPRO which enable fields to be enabled/disabled. It may be that the customizing could also control fields on the old SAPGUI equivalent transactions. In this case no suitable customizing was identified.

2.2                          Personalisation

As standard a user can change Lists using the Settings button above and to the right of the list. So we confirmed that the Item Text was not already available to add to the table in this way:

As shown above many additional attributes are available to show in the table, but Item Text is not amongst them.

2.3                          Run Time Adaptation (RTA)

Runtime Adaptation is functionality to enable a super-user to make basic changes to Fiori apps which will apply to all users (unlike Personalization which each user would need to perform themselves). More information is in SAP Help here.

Note that to use RTA you must be assigned role SAP_UI_FLEX_KEY_USER in the front-end Gateway system. Having done this an ‘Adapt UI’ option becomes available in Fiori Launchpad:

Unfortunately the use of RTA is currently limited to apps using ‘SmartForm’ or ‘ObjectPage’ controls; Revise Payment Proposals uses neither and so RTA cannot be used in this case. An example of an app where RTA is possible is the Purchase Requisition Item Factsheet:

As shown above, in UI Adaptation mode various UI changes may be made without coding. You can learn more about Object Page based Factsheets here.

2.4                          Fiori Extensibility Apps

A Fiori App is available to define Custom Fields and Logic for other Fiori apps:

We therefore explored if it may be possible to define a custom field for Item Text. However in the app (on 1511 on-premise FPS1 at least) only a very limited number of Business Contexts are available for enhancement:

For Custom Logic only a Demo app can be extended on this release:

So this extensibility technique could not be used in this case; however for future reference there is more information here.

2.5                          Conclusion

In our case the only remaining extensibility option was to use the Web IDE, which I explain step-by-step in the next part.