Personal Insights
Fiori Elements vs Fiori Freestyle – Fare Comparison
This is blog is inspired by UI5 Advanced Programming Model – Overview (UI5con 2019) one. Wouter Lemaire demonstrated Fiori Freestyle capabilities creating very nice looking Fiori transaction app. He elaborated advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. To make a fare comparison, I created CDS / BOPF / List Fiori Element version of Person transactional app.
I want to add my two cents to Fiori Elements vs Freestyle discussion. As much as like I freestyle nicely looking UIs, wherever possible, I prefer go standard. Why Fiori Elements also appeals to me because SAPUI5 code is generated based on CDS View annotations. One way or another, you need to take care of validations, default values, etc. In my example, this complexity is shifted to BOPF. Long story short, complexity is still there. It is spread around between different layers. So now the choice is yours. You can make an informative decision based on what you are more comfortable with either Fiori or Fior Elements / CDS / BOPF.
My app have still the same capabilities as a freestyle one. You can maintain a list of persons and their respective skills. Individual skills ratings update overall person rating.
You can download CDS / BOPF back-end development from here and Fiori Element List front-end development from here
Hi , great to see I inspired you 🙂 Agree that this could also work with BOPF and CDS. But is it as flexible as freestyle? Can you make it reactive? Calculate the average before saving? Adding a new line as soon as all others are being used? What if your business wants a different design? If your customer is happy with the standard then this is perfectly fine, I just experienced different 🙂
You also need to be aware that not all customers are on the latest system with the nice BOPF and CDS features.
Thank you for sharing your point of view!
Hello,
Nice blog and thanks for sharing.
What Wouter said is completely right. In my experience, I would prefer Fiori Elements for display purpose than editing.
All time I try to implement Fiori Elements in edit mode, I have my business which say : "hey I would like to have a dynamic list of option depending of another dynamic field !". In that case it is hard to accomplish the job without creating a bullshit program unmaintainable.
Regards
Joseph
I agree, I also find Fiori Elements only good for display purposes.
But I have not been brave enough to explore the extension capabilities of Fiori Elements, eg. extension controller class and view XMLs. Has anyone tried to see if they prove enough flexibility?
In my projects, there is not enough time to go down the Fiori Element route only to discover we can't satisfy a business requirement.
Thanks Uladzislau!
I think, it needs both, freestyle and generated Fiories.
On which ABAP backend version did you create your shared code?
7.5