SAP BTP Developer Onboarding II | Hands-on Video Tutorials

Hands-On Video Tutorials – Part II

Philip MUGGLESTONE just updated his developer onboarding video tutorial series for the SAP Cloud Platform. In this blog, you will find the videos embedded with some additional information and resources. Following along in the patented zero-to-hero format, no prior knowledge required, you will be ready to start developing business applications on the platform with minimal effort and no time wasted.

You can watch the seven video tutorials in a little over one hour. What you learn is

• How to develop a standalone application using SAP Business Application Studio and deploy to the SAP Cloud Foundry environment
• How to work with destinations
• How to use Cloud Foundry User authentication and authorisation (UAA)
• How to use SAP HANA for persistence
• How to leverage the Cloud Application Programming (CAP) model
• How to make use of XSJS compatibility to deploy your SAP HANA XS classic model applications as-is to SAP HANA XS Advanced model and Cloud Foundry.

Ready? Let’s jump!

To bookmark the playlist on YouTube, go to

• SAP Cloud Platform Developer Onboarding

Because we know your time is precious, we have included code snippets so you can easily and merrily code along. For the GitHub repository with sample code, go to

• github.com/saphanaacademy/scpapps

Standalone App

In this video tutorial, we work with a sample Node.js application from a sample Github repository using SAP Business Application Studio. We first run the app locally to validate everything works. Next, we deploy the app to the Cloud Foundry environment.

Steps

Connect to the SAP Business Application Studio, create a new dev space and add the MTA Tools extension.

Clone the GitHub repository with sample code from github.com/saphanaacademy/scpapps.

We can run the sample Node.js app locally in a terminal window and deploy it to the platform using the cf push command.

From the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit, we can manage the app and access the log files, the equivalent of the commands

cf a
cf app myappnode
cf logs myappnode --recent
cf d myappnode -r

App with Destination Service

In this video tutorial, we develop an app for the Cloud Foundry environment that makes use of a destination service.

For documentation, see

• SAP Cloud Platform Connectivity

Steps

First create a destination. We use the OData Test service https://services.odata.org/V2/Northwind/Northwind.svc

Next, create an instance of the Destination service and bind it the myappdest sample application.

A service key has been created as part of the binding process.

Which will be used as environment variables for the connection.

With the Business Application Studio we can also simulate the service access (binding) and run it locally. This will greatly improve the development experience and productivity as we do not have to deploy our app each time to validate our code.

App with Authentication

In this video tutorial, we develop a multi-target app (MTA) that requires end user authentication.

First, we create a local service instance and bind it to the destination while working in local development mode and test the authentication is successful. Once validated, we can build the MTA and deploy the app to the platform.

Both the router (front-end) and server (back-end) have been deployed with the service instance created.

To remove both applications and the services, use command

cf undeploy myappuaa --delete-services -f

App with HANA

In this video tutorial, we continue our development journey and create a multi-target app (MTA) that includes data persistence in SAP HANA.

First, create a new Cloud Foundry service for your environment, choosing service plan hdi-shared and bind the service to the local application.

As before, we need to update the .env file to default-env.json and wrap the environment in JSON format.

The relevant design-time artifacts are sales.hdbtable and sales.hdbtabledata with the sales.csv file.

The server.js file contains the actual SQL code that get’s executed.

We run the application with the ‘npm i’ command to install the HDI Deployer and ‘npm run start’ to start the deployment (– — exit to exit when done).

cd myapphana\db
npm i 
npm run start -- --exit 

The console output shows the deployment process.

As before, to build the application right-click on the package.json file to build the MTA and subsequently from the  MTA_archives folder, deploy MTA Archive.

CAP App

In this video tutorial, we use the SAP Cloud Application Programming model (CAP) to develop applications, including data persistence in SAP HANA.

For information about CAP, go to

• SAP Cloud Application Programming Model

After creating a new dev space in the Business Application Studio using SAP Cloud Business Application template.

From the terminal, create the app structure and run the ‘watch’ command to activate CDS.

cds init myappcap
cds watch

We create the application by using code snippets from the github.com/saphanaacademy/scpapps repository to

• db/schema.cds
• srv/cat-service.cds
• srv/cat-service.js

By default, persistence uses a sql-lite database. To use SAP HANA, first enable and then deploy after connection the studio to the Cloud Foundry environment.

cds add hana
cds deploy --to hana

To run the application locally, install the dependencies and run

npm i
cds run

To deploy the application, execute

cds build
cd gen/srv
cf push --random-route

App with XSJS Compatibility Layer

In this video tutorial, we learn how to develop a multi-target (MTA) app that accesses data persistence in SAP HANA via the XSJS compatibility layer, to continue using SAP HANA XS classic model artifacts including XSODATA with XS Advanced.

For the documentation, go to

• Use the XSJS Compatibility Layer in XS Advanced, SAP HANA Developer Guide for SAP HANA XS Advanced Model

[0:00] – introduction XSJS compatibility layer

[1:35] – clone repository from github.com/saphanaacademy/scpapps.git

[2:30] – package.json of srv includes xsjs dependency

{
  "dependencies": {
    "@sap/xsenv": "^2",
    "@sap/xsjs": "^6"
  },

[2:40] – server.js contains xsjs bootstrap code with options

const xsjs = require('@sap/xsjs');
const xsenv = require('@sap/xsenv');

var options = {
	anonymous: false,
	xsApplicationUser: true,
	auditLog: { logToConsole: true },
	redirectUrl: '/srv/index.xsjs'
};

[3:00] – runs like xsjs application

const port = process.env.PORT || 5001;
xsjs(options).listen(port);
console.info('Listening on http://localhost:' + port);

[3:30] – original .xsjs and .xsodata files are located in the lib directory.

[4:20] – build and deploy project

[5:00] – Go to SAP Cloud Platform cockpit > Subaccount > Security: Role Collection Trust. Note a new role collection has been created. Assign this role collection to your the e-mail address for the trust configuration SAP ID Service (or any other identify provider.

[5:40] – test application

[5:55] – validate OData service calls ($metadata, etc.)

[7:30] – more information in readme.md

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Best,

Denys van Kempen