SAP Teched 2019 – Vegas – Key Takeover For Developers

Salut!

Haven’t got chance to write something from last few months, but I finally have something to share with all my Developer friends and hopefully you will find it worth for your respective areas.

I got an opportunity to be at SAP Teched – 2019 at Vegas and apart from meeting some amazing people ,I also got a chance to learn some new( some of you might think/say they are not new – So lets say Less known/used in general ) things which I want to share with you all, before it gets washed away, so scribbling my key takeovers.

Firstly, for ABAP’ers –

1. ABAP is not dead 🙂

• • Most of S4HANA code is still based on ABAP as programming language , especially if you are on-Premise, you have the same options to enhance the code as before . While S4 cloud limits you to specific tools rather apps to do enhancements (e.g. Custom Fields and Business logic , Custom CDS views, Custom BO etc ), restricting  even direct DB table access
  • Ofcourse you should adapt your ABAP code to learn new ABAP on HANA , code pushdown to HANA (using CDS and AMDP ) , new ABAP constructs ( New ABAP syntax and constructs from NW74 and above)  and also make sure u check your code against the HANA ATC variant . And if you still don’t know ABAP OOPS , it’s hight time to learn

     2.     The biggest news of teched for all ABAP’ers – ABAP on scp With SCP Free Trial         Account

• • You can play with a free trial ABAP system on ABAP as PAAS on SCP ( u ll have to work in a pre created ZLOCAL package as its being shared by all free trial holders but u can create sub-packages) . So get ur trial account on SCp trial account in cloud foundry.
  • The Idea of Abap paas for S4 cloud is to build new side-by-side Abap applications . And you can use ABAP PAAS to build Abap apps not only for S4 Cloud but also for On-Premise

3.   Other Key topics Abap’ers should start focusing on

• • ABAP Tools –  Start using Eclipse for ABAP development – ADT  (ABAP Dev Tools)
  • CDS (Specifically ABAP CDS) views is the key topic to learn  . Almost all programming models in S4 are based on cds views . Annotations are key concept which is being used greatly , which is nothing but rich metadata telling the behaviour of the object e.g. ui annotations in cds views could directly build a fiori app for you
  • ABAP Git Integration – also called gCTS combining Github with sap traditional CTS process using a CI(Continous Integration) server e.g. Jenkins
  • Lastly ABAP RESTful Programming model – Mostly ABAP’ers who are starting to Build Odata sevrices. See section Odata below

Workflow Developers

1. Build Custom Workflow on scp using Another service – named “Workflow” provided to develop custom workflows for S4HANA and other sap solutions ( not all ) .
2. Uses Enterprise messaging service to manage events and queues .
3. Business objects in ecc wf is replaced by odata/rest calls .
4. While the ui’s for user tasks are replaced by ui5 apps(mostly) .
5. Context -Which is nothing but WF variables; Is passed as JSON

FIORI/UI5 Developers

1. One architectural Point on FES/GW

It is recommended to NOT use a separate GW or FES for launching your Fiori apps from S4  . Rather  have Embedded deployment with FES component part of S4HANA . In case you have multiple S4 systems, SAP is working towards having a Central launchpad to integrate all your S4 and even other SAP solutions, which is not yet available but will be announced soon hopefully.

2. Fiori 3 Announced – Key points
   • Provide consistent UI across different sAP solutions( s4 , Ariba , concur etc) : Shell header bar consistent across all solutions
   • Comes with quartz light theme ( dark in-progress)
   • Provides Intelligence – Comes with a co-pilot : like a virtual assistant  ( u need to enable specific service to get this as I understand)
   • Custom Apps developed using Fiori 2 automatically works with Fiori 3
   • Available from S4 Cloud 1908 and S4 1909 On Premise
3. FIORI Launchpad(FLP)
   • With FIORI 3 , SAP is trying to add much rich content to FLP apart from tiles – Which will be called CARDS to bring useful insights as well
   • Also idea is to have single Central entry point for all Solutions or for all application to be accessed by a user – For Which Portal Service is available to add any S4 std apps , custom apps(deployed in cloud foundry or Neo or backend systems) or any external URL’s
   • FLP Content Manager tool – Which is like a Rapid activation tool for FIORI ; Tool is in GUI and is like a supplement to FLP designer.It is like mass maintenance tool to manage Cataolgs , Tile/Target MAppings , generate test Role  and user id
4. Emphasis on Using Fiori Elements

1. • To reduce development time , achieve consistency across apps and auto forward compatible
   • There was a mention that 80% of scenarios or apps  built in S4 is using std fiori elements . So almost most of the app designs could be achieved using Fiori elements . In other cases one could use UI5 elements or any other framework – angular etc to build the app

5. Development Tool for Fiori app development

Shifting from Web ide Full Stack-To Sap app studio  which is like ms visual studio code. Even MS Visual Studio code coming in with FIORI development plugins

6. Various ways to develop FIORI apps
   • From CDS view annotations – Such that when try to create Project in WebIDe, it reads those annotation to build the UI
   • From Local annotation file within the Fiori project – where u specify different annotation for UI Data fields , facts and even page navigation is very easy to define
   • Lastly CAP – Cloud Application Programming Which is general programming model for developing applications including data model , services , UI  . Note – it could only be deployed in Cloud foundry env
7. Lastly on app design/mockup tool

New tool SKETCH mentioned – open source tool which seems more intuitive than BUILD

Odata Developers

1. Development options for creating Odata service

• Odata Development options has evolved over the years with different NW and S4HANA releases

1. • Systems < 7.40 : Using Traditional Odata development in code SEGW – to handle all URI options ( e.g. filter , top , select ) scenarios in DPC class
   • Systems > 7.40 & 7.50 & S4 1809 – Using CDS as Ref Data Source : Less coding as CDS could handle automatically
   • Systems > 7.51 and S4 1909 – Using ABAP Programming Model for Fiori – Using BOPF , CDS
   • Lastly – The newest Abap Restful programming model  , the newest ABAP programming model , , to build Odata(v2 or V4), based on CDS , Behaviour and Business Service . Also Give u some quick option to get FIORI App preview(List based)  from Service Definition. Available from S4 1909 (Thanks to Mike for his comment below)
2. Also a generic guidance given was to build odata service based on expected behaviour and not overload single service with everything

Integration Developers- 

1.  CPI as Recommended Integration Tool –

• As per SAP they are no longer investing on PO but focusing on CPI majorly . So its still questionable if PO will stay, but for now apart from Premise-To-Premise use case , SAP is recommending to use CPI with all cloud based integrations

• Possible to download CPI content to PO ( at least 7.5 SP05) but not the other way . You can only import mappings from PO to CPI and not the full flow – Obvious reason being all functionalities of PO are not yet supported in CPI

       2. Open connectors Service in SCP

To accelerate connectivoty to non sap applications  e.g. Slack , MS Dynamics CRM , HubSpot           etc (which can be exposed via api calls) else adaptor to be built using adk-abap dev kit.

User id and pwds to connect to  these are saved in this services and consumed using               connectivity string generated here

       3. Event messaging service in SCP

To build event based integration. For decoupling the applications and for asynchronous processing . It has “queues” to which u subscribe the “web hooks”  which has events identified with patterns

       4. API Management Service in SCP

Expose   sap and non sap – rest or soap based services and processes ( e.g. Iflows)  as API’s .

It is like an API authoring tool , where u could document your services or processes , apply policies , bundle them in products and then expose it to outer world

       5. For data integration

SDI is the recommended tool and SAP doesn’t seem to be investing in CPI-DS or DS or BODS

I hope this would give u some idea on where SAP is focusing on, in different areas.

Disclaimer:

For each of the topics mentioned above if you just Google, you will easily find content and tutorials to dig deeper.

And you could start doing hands on using Hana or scp trial account .

Happy Learning 🙂