Technical Articles
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.
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.
it's amazing. Much lighter than the eclipse. Just need you:
With those three things, it would be perfect. Very good job. I will remain attentive to the development
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...)
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.
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
WOW!!! Madness!! hahaha I loved it, unfortunately came too late for me, but I already forward to my ABAP friends. 🙂
Excellent, thank you very much ?
This is awesome... Looking forward to the further feature upgrades.
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
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
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
Excellent work!!
amazing work
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.
Still pretty far from that I'm afraid
Very nice!
thanks
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!
Hi Custodio
Plan yes, another user asked for it.
I just have no idea how, but will figure it out eventually
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.
Excelent work! I will give it a try.
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.
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!
Excellent Idea Marcello! I love vscode as well 🙂
Thx!
Thorsten