SAP Business Application Studio and JSDoc

About

Update 20.February.2022:  Built-in feature for JavaScript is available in Business Application Studio / VSCode. You can type in /** before a function definition, and the comments will be generated automatically. This article however still valid to get familiar with management of extensions.

This post is about adding the JSDoc functionality to SAP Business Application Studio. This feature is not part of the default configuration. JSDoc was built-in the predecessor product SAP WebIDE Fullstack, and you most probably miss it during development in this new product. Business Application Studio is the cloud version of Visual Studio Code, based on Eclipse Theia platform. It is running as a virtual instance in the SAP Cloud Foundry environment. You can use npm or Visual Studio extensions in this environment to complement the default features of SAP Business Application Studio.

Extending Business Application Studio

We are going to use the Document This extension from the Open VSX (Visual Studio Extension) Registry. This tool is applicable to add JSDoc even for TypeScript -ed sources. TypeScript will come soon to UI5, so this extension should operate in further.

Open SAP Buisiness Application Studio, and Select View – Extensions (Ctrl+Shift+X) from the menu.

Search for the document this extension, and install.

Using the new extension to add JSDoc comments

You can use the new feature instantly. Place the cursor on the element to be documented, and just press Ctrl+Alt+D twice.

Outlook

We learned – not only – how to add this particular feature, but seen to add extension to SAP Business Application Studio, which opens wide range of possibilities. SAP gives no warranty on the operations made by 3rd party extensions, so just ensure you’re using Git to back up your project sources.

Hope you enjoyed this quick info shot 🙂 !