How to add annotations to an OData service without using code

In this post I will showcase some of the features controlled by OData annotations. With the use of annotations in OData, we can minimize the UI View code to be written for conventional scenarios like showing text and filtering data.

Example 1: Showing search help for Filter in Personalization Dialog

Example 2: Showing Text

Example 1

The p13n dialog control provides a dialog for tables that allows the user to personalize one or more of the following attributes:

• Columns
• Sort
• Filter
• Group

The third tab is the Filter tab, which allows the user to filter based on specific criteria.

The filter criteria can be included or excluded in the relevant section of the filter.

The user selects the column to be filtered. Any of the columns can be selected from the dropdown.

The second field offers an operator for specifying the filter in more detail. The operators that are available depends on the data type of the selected column.

Scenario

Created OData ‘ZTEST_SEARCHHElP’

Main Entity: Customer

Value Help Entity: Customer Value Help

Click on Annotation at properties

Click on com.sap.vocabularies.Common.v1

Click on ValueList-> Create Annotation

Pass the ValueHelp Entity in label and ValueHelp Entityset in CollectionPath

In Parameters

For ValuelistParameterInOut

For ValueListParameterDisplay

In DPC_EXT we need to implement the CustomerValueHelp entityset to fetch the value

2> Text name

We need to Click on Annotation->com.sap.vocabularies.Common.v1->Text

Create Annotation and pass the name of the customer

The value will be displayed as below.