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Author's profile photo Marcello Urbani

ABAP remote plugin for visual studio code

As much as I love the ABAP developer tools for Eclipse, it still feel a bit clunky compared with modern code editors .

I particularly like Visual Studio Code, so a few months ago I started a project to enable using it to edit ABAP code, and released it as a plugin just before Christmas.

It’s currently available in the code marketplace, but is more convenient to just search for it in the editor UI.

I highly recommend to pair it with the ABAP and ABAPLint plugins (although the latter doesn’t work for function modules yet). ABAP Snippets is also useful.

It’s still in its early stages, and lacks lots of the features currently available in Eclipse, but is capable enough to be useful. I would think twice before using it on production code though.

For now it supports programs, classes and function groups (other object types might work on some platforms) with the following functions:

  • edit
  • create
  • activate
  • search

It can also assign/create transports if needed.

I plan to add functionality for code completion and validation soon, still have to start working on it.

 

 

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      Author's profile photo Matthias Maisch
      Matthias Maisch

      After I saw how smooth the snippets work in VS code I hoped that this would happen some day. Thank you! Can't wait to try it.

      Author's profile photo Angel Puertas
      Angel Puertas

      it's amazing. Much lighter than the eclipse. Just need you:

       

      1. Enter the connection language on the settings
      2. Outline complete as in the eclipse
      3. Favorite's package as in the eclipse

      With those three things, it would be perfect. Very good job. I will remain attentive to the development

       

       

      Author's profile photo Marcello Urbani
      Marcello Urbani
      Blog Post Author

      Good point about the language, will add to the issue list.

      I guess you mean autocomplete: it's the next big thing, right now I'm working on starting programs in SAPGUI.

      It stalled for a while due to Christmas and the need of quite a bit of work to allow stuff like autocomplete, find reference and so on (need to spawn another process for the language server...)

      Author's profile photo Angel Puertas
      Angel Puertas

      In eclipse you can see a detail of the class: methods, attributes, etc. It is very useful to develop and that is missing in the plugin.

      Even so, It's a great job what you are doing.

       

       

      Author's profile photo Marcello Urbani
      Marcello Urbani
      Blog Post Author

      like many other things: navigation, completion,source code fixes, debugging,…

      Most of these things require what is called a language server in visual studio code: they will come eventually when I find the time to code them.

      Right now I’m in the middle of a big refactoring…

      Thanks anyway

      PS: language support is there now

      Author's profile photo Henrique Mattos
      Henrique Mattos

      WOW!!! Madness!! hahaha I loved it, unfortunately came too late for me, but I already forward to my ABAP friends. 🙂

       

      Author's profile photo Stefan Schnell
      Stefan Schnell

      Excellent, thank you very much ?

       

      Author's profile photo Nabheet Madan
      Nabheet Madan

      This is awesome... Looking forward to the further feature upgrades.

      Author's profile photo Paul Hardy
      Paul Hardy

      Are you working with Lars Hvam (inventor of abapGit) on this? At TechEd Barcelona he showed me the exact thing you describe above, as he does not like Eclipse.

      I just want to make sure there are not two open source projects aiming for the exact same thing

      Author's profile photo Lars Hvam
      Lars Hvam

      yeah, there is no overlap in implementations, Marcello calls the ADT REST services, I try to do stuff without a backend :o) So perhaps there is overlap in the functionality, like ADT REST can provide an outline, which the abaplint vscode extension can also do(sometimes :o) ).

      Calling the ADT REST services will give correct results, whereas abaplint is messed up

      Author's profile photo Marcello Urbani
      Marcello Urbani
      Blog Post Author

      I'm in touch with Lars, but as he explained it's a different project.

      Once I get a reasonably good IDE with completion, syntax check, navigation and so I might look into adding some abapgit support, but might get weird as it's a completely different API, and file formats are different too

      Author's profile photo Allen Zhang
      Allen Zhang

      Excellent work!!

      Author's profile photo RAJJAN KHAN
      RAJJAN KHAN

      amazing work

      Author's profile photo Mark Richards
      Mark Richards

      Awesome start.  I'm imagining a world of being able to work on BSP/UI5 app purely from Code without the common reliance on eclipse for deployment.  It's a good world.

      Author's profile photo Marcello Urbani
      Marcello Urbani
      Blog Post Author

      Still pretty far from that I'm afraid

      Author's profile photo Michelle Crapo
      Michelle Crapo

      Very nice!

      Author's profile photo Marcello Urbani
      Marcello Urbani
      Blog Post Author

      thanks

      Author's profile photo Custodio de Oliveira
      Custodio de Oliveira

      Hi Marcello,

       

      I've finally had a chance to use it and it's really nice! One question: is there a plan to support SSO (SNC)? Or maybe it's already there and I missed it?

       

      Thanks again, great work!

      Author's profile photo Marcello Urbani
      Marcello Urbani
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Custodio

      Plan yes, another user asked for it.

      I just have no idea how, but will figure it out eventually

      Author's profile photo Walter Zolkin
      Walter Zolkin

      AWESOME!!!! Thanks! I hope SAP themselfs will someday bring a proper plugin or even take yours and enhance it for more functions like ddic etc.

      Author's profile photo Guilherme Dellagustin
      Guilherme Dellagustin

      Excelent work! I will give it a try.

      Author's profile photo Ioan Radulescu
      Ioan Radulescu

      Marcello Urbani this is good stuff. Maybe if you get enough people using this, SAP will pay more attention to IDEs (especially in the "cloud" - why do they think that because it's running on someone else's computer the IDE has to be web-based??? that wasn't the case with on-premise systems, which are also running on someone else's computer). I'm going to try to use this directly from my mac and I'll post my experience in a couple of weeks.

      Author's profile photo Marcello Urbani
      Marcello Urbani
      Blog Post Author

      Thank you!

      Looks like they're coming out with a vs code (well,Theia I guess) IDE in cloudfoundry. Not sure we'll see a standalone version though 🙁

      Let me know how it goes!

      Author's profile photo Thorsten Klingbeil
      Thorsten Klingbeil

      Excellent Idea Marcello! I love vscode as well 🙂

      Thx!

      Thorsten