Our use of the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP)

I want to provide the SAP community with insights as to where and how we are using the SAP Cloud Application Programming model or short CAP. I saw a presentation on it at TechEd in Las Vegas in 2019 and was immediately impressed by the potential in efficiency gains. Since then, we have used it in several contexts which I will outline below.

We (https://www.rizing.com) are a boutique SAP consulting house focusing on areas where Human Capital Management, Enterprise Asset Management including Geospatial Services and Consumer Industries intersect with SAP.

The use of CAP in connection with other components of the Business Technology Platform allows us to focus on the core business logic and significantly reduce the overall implementation effort in project and product developments.

Industry Cloud App

This jointly developed SAP Industry Cloud project planned to be released in Q3 is focused on delivering collaborative spatial capabilities that can be extended by partners, within multiple SAP Business Network solutions. As part of that project, we are using CAP as framework for a backend service.

Beyond the common CAP functionalities, we are also making use of:

• The geospatial data type to store geometry.
• The temporal aspect to model the timeline of location changes (an example could be the “current” location of a shipment over its lifecycle)
• Integration with the HANA Document Store to persist generic key-value pairs.

CAP used in Spatial Service

Use in our SAP Store Apps

As part of our product development efforts, we are starting to use CAP as the foundation for all our BTP based apps. One of them (Rizing Carbon) is already using a CAP based backend service to facilitate UI backing functions.

CAP use in Rizing Carbon

Use in customer project in connection with Cloud Integration

A customer of ours in the retail space enlisted our help to build a standard interface of their SaaS based excess inventory solution with their (potential) customers S/4 systems. The solution is completely built on the SAP Business Technology Platform. The Integration scenario itself is modeled in Cloud Integration. Complex Business logic and customer specific configurations are built out in a CAP service.

CAP use in excess inventory optimization

Our Innovation team’s CAP use

Innovation app

As in most companies, at Rizing we are asking our employees to submit their improvement and innovation ideas through a central app. All employees can see, comment and vote on them.

The latest version of our Innovation app runs on CAP with a Fiori Elements user interface.

Rizing Innovation App

HANA Data Provisioning Agent – ESRI – OData Adapter Proxy

To prove the feasibility of using HANA as consolidation for internal and external GIS data, we prototyped a CAP based proxy that bridged the GAP between ESRI’s REST endpoints and the HANA OData adapter.

HANA – ESRI Proxy

Weather station IoT Receiver

To showcase the IoT capabilities in SAP’s Intelligent Asset Management Suite, we used a CAP application to receive a weather station feed, store the values in a HANA Cloud database and update the Asset Management suite so it can be used to indicate dangerous weather patterns that might impact assets in the field.

Weather Station Integration with SAP Asset Management

Links

We will continue to give back to the community. A colleague of mine (Jhodel Cailan) is an avid blogger on the topic of CAP. Here you can find his contributions:

https://people.sap.com/jhodel18#content:blogposts

Special thanks

We want to express our special thanks to people in the community continuously supporting and educating others on the topic:

• Gregor Wolf (@gregor.wolf)
• Volker Buzek (@vobu)
• DJ Adams (@dj.adams.sap)
• Thomas Jung (@thomas.jung)
• Everybody on the CAP development team(s) for their patience and great support

Conclusion

I hope this post provided you a view on how CAP is used based on real world experience.

Please share your feedback and thoughts in the comment section below. I am happy to create some follow on posts regarding implementation specifics if there is interest. Related posts will be updated in here.

You can find more relevant content by following the tag “SAP Cloud Application Programming Model”