SAPUI5 Flexibility – The Journey Continues

SAPUI5 flexibility allows to shape UIs to create a tailored user experience. Developers can extend UIs without touching the source code of an original application, key users can adapt UIs for multiple users at once without writing a single line of code, and end users can personalize apps to their own preferences. Whether you are an experienced user of SAPUI5 flexibility already who’s interested in what’s new, or whether you have never heard about it before and want to know, how you can benefit from it, welcome aboard!

“All You Need To Know”

SAP already delivers thousands of standard SAP Fiori apps. However, our customers have very diverse business requirements and a “one size fits all” approach with UI is often not realistic. This is where SAPUI5 flexibility comes to the rescue: To save development costs and avoid building new UIs from scratch, SAPUI5 flexibility empowers three personas with various skillsets to extend existing apps according to their use case. “Extend to adopt” is our motto, so we have developed a completely modification-free approach for changing UIs, which allows to still profit from further upgrades of the original extended application without having to recreate the changes each time. SAPUI5 flexibility also comes with an intuitive visual tooling that enables truly “low code/no code” extensibility.

SAPUI5 flexibility is a generic framework functionality of UI5 that is available for the three target personas (developers, key users, and end users) on multiple platforms. It requires a compatible back end for storing and handling changes. . This back-end functionality is available on all main SAP platforms: ABAP platform, SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Business Technology Platform. The set of features and the user flow might slightly vary for each platform. So, searching for documentation can be pretty exhausting sometimes, we know. And we try to improve – we have just published a new entry point: SAPUI5 Flexibility – All You Need to Know. This will be the compass of our journey and will guide us through the main scenarios, provide an overview of available platforms, and show where to get the needed information quickly. Let’s take off!

What You May Have Missed in SAPUI5 Flexibility

Embedding External Content

Okay, we have a compass, but what about a map? Let’s get one! With key user adaptation, it is now possible to embed maps, videos or any other external content as an iframe to an object page! We also support passing contextual information of the page, such as the displayed product name or the supplier address, to the embedded site via a URL parameter. Check this and other features in the following video:

SAPUI5 on SAP Business Technology Platform

The journey goes to the cloud! For end users working with SAPUI5 apps via the SAP Launchpad service, SAPUI5 flexibility offers personalization out of the box. And if key users need to change UIs for multiple users at once or create public views, we offer a dedicated standalone service for it: SAP flexibillity for key users. Note, that service consumption is only needed if you are planning to build your own UI5 apps in SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry environment, and want to keep them adaptable for your consumers. For adapting SAP- or partner-delivered apps, the app provider will take care of the service which means there’ll be no additional costs for the consumer. And, of course, you can continue to use public views and key user adaptation for all supported applications integrated into the SAP Launchpad service from other platforms (e.g. from SAP S/4HANA) with no additional effort!

Harmonized Developer Extensibility in SAP Business Application Studio

Let’s move on! With the release of adaptation projects for SAP Business Application Studio, we now have a one-stop tool for extending SAPUI5 Applications that supports both freestyle and SAP Fiori elements apps with a unified visual editor experience. But this is not only about consistency – there are also new adaptation options available with this move come: from now on it is possible to extend freestyle apps not only in the predefined extension points but wherever stable IDs are available! And for more complex cases where coding should be involved, controller extensions come in handy.

Where do we go from here?

Now that you have checked our latest milestones, it is time to define new goals:

• Developer extensibility for UI5 apps in SAP BTP, CF environment: The full power of adaptation projects available for cloud apps.
• Sharing of key user views with specific user roles in ABAP platform: To tailor the role-based experience even further, SAPUI5 flexibility will allow defining table or filter views for specific user roles.
• Visualization of changes: Conveniently highlight the UI adaptation changes that were made on the UI.

Stay tuned for these and many more upcoming features of SAPUI5 flexibility in the SAP Road Map Explorer. I hope to meet you again down this road!

Update: New course featuring SAPUI5 flexibility

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