Technical Articles
Storyboard for cloud business applications using CAP in SAP Business Application Studio
In the last release of SAP Business Application Studio, we released the first version of a new tool – the Storyboard!
The Storyboard is a detailed graphical view for CAP applications that presents their logical components and the connections between them.
The storyboard, together with the application explorer for CAP (which was also enhanced in the last release), helps you develop large parts of your application using modeling and graphical editors.
To open the Storyboard, open the context menu on the root of the application in the application explorer:
A command to open the Storyboard is also available from the command palette.
Let’s go over the storyboard’s main capabilities and advantages:
- A graphical view of the data models, services, and UI front ends of the application, as well as the connections between them.
Using the storyboard is the best way to get a quick understanding of the application’s structure and components.You can move, zoom in and out, and expand and collapse single objects or all objects at once.You can also filter objects to focus on the application components that are relevant for you.
- Integration with graphical editors and wizards
You can develop a significant part of the application using graphical tools and wizards.
Create and edit CDS data models and services:- You can create a new data model or service from the toolbar or from the application explorer.
- The CDS graphical modeler is used to edit new or existing data models.
- You can open the CDS graphical modeler for editing from the namespace or service edit buttons, or from the application explorer.
To learn more on the CDS graphical modeler see the documentation.
- You can create a new data model or service from the toolbar or from the application explorer.
- Create an SAP Fiori elements UI
You can create an SAP FE application using the wizard. Open it from the toolbar or from the application explorer.
You can read more about creating the UI front-end in my previous blog post. - Consume external services
Add and consume external services using the SAP Consume Services tool, that can be opened from the application explorer. - Expose the data model as a service
You can select a data model and, with one click, expose it via a new service. - Open in Code Editor
Once you have finished working in the storyboard, you can easily navigate to the code from the application explorer.
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post 🙂
To get more information on SAP Business Application Studio, check out the info blog
We would be very interested to hear your input, so feel free to add your comments below or send us ideas
Happy coding!
That looks very promising. Is any of this available for On-Premise applications (Fiori Tools, UI5 Tooling, S4)?
Thanks Jeroen! Not sure I understand your question... The storyboard tool is available in BAS. You can open it on any CAP application that's available in your workspace.
Yes, that's what I mean, we don't have cloud, so we develop Fiori applications for on premise, not the cloud. So will some of these editors / modeling tools will be useable to develop Fiori applications that are not CAP?
Not at the moment, but we will consider to support this in the future.