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Author's profile photo Jitendra Kansal
Jitendra Kansal
April 1, 2019 4 minute read

What’s new in Mobile Services App Development Tools 1903

In case you are still wondering what exactly is “Mobile Services App  Development Tools” ? Well, let me share some insights on this –  

in SAP Web IDE (full Stack) there is now a dedicated extension (aka plugin) for creating and developing Mobile development kit and SAP Mobile Cards based applications along with Mobile Backend Tools that provides capabilities enabling you to quickly build an mobile enabled OData service that constitutes your mobile back-end service for mobile applications.  

Here is help documentation for more details.  

The main focus of 1903 release are –  

CRUD Template for MDK Application

 You may have seen it already that in last release we made available two new templates Base and List-Detail in SAP Web IDE to jump start with Mobile development kit based app development.  There is now a new template that adds CRUD (create, read update & Delete) functionalities for selected OData Entities. 

 

QR Code for MDK on-boarding

In the past, it was a manual process to generate an on-boarding URL for an MDK app, copying various server related parameters, sharing that URL via email or some other means or generating an QR Code manually.  

 Here in this release, we have made on-boarding process a bit simpler , when you deploy MDK app from SAP Web IDE to Mobile Services, you will see option to view QR code, with this, you can easily get on-boarded to the application also can share this QR code with others to enable them to quickly onboard to the application. 

Correctly validate MDK component with reference to Base or other application

When an MDK component project is imported into the editor there will be a large number of validation errors due to the references that are part of the base application the component will be integrated with at deploy time.   

Editor adds a concept of reference applications in application.app. The steps are: 

  1. Do component validation, if there are application reference errors, go to step2. 
  2. Open component’s application.app, and scroll to the bottom in application editor. 
  3. Click the button of ‘Reference Applications’, and select the target reference applications, click save. 
  4. Do component validation, those application reference errors disappear. 

 

Property Initial Values for complex controls in MDK Control Editor

 It’s now possible to see where the properties will be shown on selected control in a page editor.  

Call SAP Web IDE Editor from MDK Recipe (Admin UI)

 

QR Code for Mobile Cards Registration

You will now see QR code for registration (like the API tab in Mobile Services Admin UI).

Sync Cards in MCK Editor

It’s now possible to sync mobile cards in MCK editor. To understand how this works –  developer downloads a card in SAP Web IDE, makes some changes and deploys this card to Mobile Services. Later, Administrator makes some changes to that card in Mobile Services Cockpit, in order to bring that change to the card in SAP Web IDE, developer now have an option to sync the card with latest changes.

 

Enhancements to Mobile backend tools graphical modeller

In this release, the user interface is re-organised and simplified. All buttons are moved to the top of the designer, although their functionalities remain the same. At the top of the right-side child window, only the search bar remains. It is used to search/filter the child table and helps users to find entities in large sets. Items in the child table may be any level of objects, e.g. Entity Types, Properties, etc. When clicking on an item, this item will be selected in the diagram. 

 

Functions of the buttons

 

Contextual menus

Some functionalities can now be access via context menus. An example is shown below:

Code Editor

In this release we have added a code editor to the graphical modeller. Clicking the left most button on top of the designer will switch to an XML editor, showing the source file of the CSDL model. To switch back to the graphical modeller, toggle the button again

 

The XML editor looks like the following:

 

Changes made in either the graphical modeller or XML editor are automatically synchronised without the need to explicitly save the file.

View in source

In the graphical modeller, you may now right-click any level of object. The context menu will include an item called “View in source”. Clicking this item will

  1. Switch to the XML editor.
  2. Highlight the source definition of the right-clicked object.

 

Many thanks to our dev colleagues to share inputs in writing up this post.

New to MDK development?

Regards

Jitendra Kansal

Product Management, SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services
SAP SE

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