SAP BTP Developer Onboarding IV | Hands-on Video Tutorials

Hands-On Video Tutorials

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.

In this set of video tutorials, Philip Mugglestone shows how to optimise local development of multi-target applications (MTA) by deploying a complete MTA to the SAP Cloud Platform, Cloud Foundry environment once and then perform local development on selected microservices while continuing to access SAP Cloud Platform service instances like SAP HANA Cloud for persistence or XSUAA for authentication and authorization. 

You can watch the three video tutorials in about 30 minutes. What you learn is

• How to prepare your local environment for MTA development
• The benefits of working with MTA
• The mechanism of application binding
• How to capture and store the environment variables used to bind application in Cloud Foundry locally
• How to run the apps locally using remote Cloud Foundry services
• How to make code changes without build and deploy
• How build and deploy a new version of the MTA

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

To bookmark the playlist on YouTube, go to

• SAP Cloud Platform Developer Onboarding

Ready? Let’s go!

Video Tutorial | Local Development 1/3

In the first video we prepare our environment and install the tools needed for local development like the Cloud Foundry CLI with the multiapps plugin, the MTA Build (MBT) tool and SAP HANA Client tools with SAP Common Crypto Lib.

0:00 introduction

0:55 Install Node.js and npm

1:10 Install Cloud Foundry CLI with multiapps plugin

2:30 Install MTA Build tool (with make for Windows)

4:25 Install SAP HANA client with SAP Common Crypto Lib

6:30 Set SECUDIR environment variable

Commands

Commands used in this video tutorial:

# CF CLI
cf version
cf plugins
cf install-plugin multiapps
# extract SAP HANA Client
sapcar -xvf IMDB_CLIENT20_<version>.SAR

The video tutorial covers Microsoft Windows. For Linux and macOS, most of the steps are the same. You can set the SECUDIR environment variables in .zshrc or .bashrc.

# macOS environment variables
export SECUDIR=/Applications/sap/hdbclient
export PATH=/Applications/sap/hdbclient:$PATH

Downloads

You can download the software from the following locations:

• A code editor like Visual Studio Code
• Node.js as JavaScript runtime with npm
• Cloud Foundry CLI from GitHub
• MultiApps CF CLI Plugin
• Multi-Target Application (MTA) build tool for Cloud Applications
• SAP HANA Client 2.6 | SAP Software Downloads
• SAPCAR | SAP Software Downloads

Documentation

For additional documentation, see

• Cloud MTA Build Tool (MBT)
• SAP HANA Client Installation and Update Guide | SAP Help Portal
• Download and Install SAP Common Crypto Library | SAP HANA Client

Video Tutorial | Local Development 2/3

In the second video tutorial, we download sample code and build and deploy the app to the SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry environment using the tools installed and learn about the benefits of MTAs and application binding.

0:00 Introduction

0:30 SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry

0:50 Sample code from Github Repository

1:30 Open in Visual Studio Code

1:50 MTA and mta.yaml

3:35 Build

4:55 Deploy MTA archive

6:25 Explore application

7:55 Service instances and binding

Code Sample

The sample code for this tutorial is available for download from GitHub:

• github.com/saphanaacademy/scpapps

Commands

Commands used in this video tutorial.

mbt build
cf deploy mta_archives/myapphana_0.0.1.mtar

Services

Applications

Sample app

Video Tutorial | Local Development 3/3

In part 3 of 3 Philip covers how to use the default-env plugin to configure MTA dependencies locally for individual Nodejs, AppRouter and HANA HDI-Container microservices and then perform local development and testing without needing to build and deploy the entire MTA each time.

0:00 Introduction

0:20 Local development srv module

1:15 npm start fails: ‘No service matching hana’

1:40 Install DefaultEnv

2:50 Capture environment variables to local default-env.json file

4:00 Start server module

4:30 Local development for app module (approuter)

5:20 Update destination and run app

6:25 Local code change without build and deploy

7:25 Local development for db module (HDI Deployer)

9:00 Run HDI Deployer locally

10:15 Debugging using export DEBUG

11:30 SAP HANA Cloud instance configuration: IP allow list

Commands

Commands used in this video tutorial.

cf install-plugin DefaultEnv.[<architecture>] 
cf plugins
cf default-env myapphana-srv

For troubleshooting use the DEBUG environment variable and specify the module. Code sample below shows the configuration for Windows Powershell.

$env:DEBUG="*" 
$env:DEBUG="@sap/hana-client*" 

Downloads

You can download the software from the following location:

• https://github.com/saphanaacademy/DefaultEnv

Running npm start locally with remote service

App running locally.

About Multi-target Applications (MTA)

As documented,

A Multitarget application (MTA) is logically a single application comprised of multiple parts created with different technologies, which share the same lifecycle.

For the benefits, getting started, capabilities, and troubleshooting, see the SCP documentation on the SAP Help Portal.

• Multitarget Applications in the Cloud Foundry Environment | SAP Cloud Platform

For the MTA Model specification, see

• The Multi-Target Application Model – a guide to understand multi-target applications

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Thanks!

If you would like to receive updates, connect with me on

• LinkedIn > linkedin.com/in/dvankempen
• Twitter > @dvankempen

For the author page of SAP PRESS, visit

• Denys van Kempen