SAP Fiori elements and SAP Fiori tools roadmap update July 2021

SAP Fiori elements has been receiving lots of attention recently, both in the UI5con keynote and in some sessions at ASUGForward. Also, the recent “Developing and Extending SAP Fiori elements Apps” openSAP course has generated great interest in SAP Fiori elements and SAP Fiori tools.

In response to the many inquiries we have received about what’s next, we have released an update to our product roadmap for SAP Fiori elements and SAP Fiori tools. All SAP Fiori tools related innovations can be found under the business capability ‘SAP Fiori App Development’ and all SAP Fiori elements related innovations under the business capability ‘User Experience Consistency’ as you can see in the screenshot below.

In this blog post, I’ll share the highlights of our updates and provide some guidance from the area product owners about their respective areas of the roadmap.

Customer suggestions drive continuous improvement

We have been continuing to enhance the functionality of SAP Fiori elements with a focus on UX evolution based on customer feedback and to adopt the latest SAP technology.
“Continuous evolution is the fuel for a great user experience,” said Suneet Agarwal, area product owner for SAP Fiori elements floorplans for OData V2. “We will continue to focus on making sure that SAP Fiori elements makes it really easy for developers to give their end users the best possible user experience. For example, we now display tables with automatic column width optimization enabled for responsive tables and we now show/hide columns based on priority and available space. Also, we have made it easier to edit sub-objects. Going forward we intend to enable adaptation extensions for RAP-based apps and invest in mass edit capabilities. All this with a focus on improving the application’s performance and delivering a consistent UX.”

OData V4 promotes innovation

Another area of innovation has been adding capabilities to support apps that are based on OData V4 services. You can see some examples in the recent sales order apps we have released for SAP S/4HANA.

“We have been investing a lot into analytics capabilities and intend to complete the analytical list page functionality by end of 2021, enhanced by OData V4 innovations such as $apply for aggregation, deep expand or $filter functions” Marita Kruempelmann, co-area product owner for SAP Fiori elements floorplans for OData V4, stated.

“In real life projects, many apps require functionality that goes beyond what SAP Fiori elements offers out of the box. Our answer to this is the flexible programming model, which comprises various capabilities to extend SAP Fiori elements apps” added Hans-Juergen “Hansi” Richstein, co-area product owner for SAP Fiori elements floorplans for OData V4. “We have been focusing on providing ‘building blocks’, which are reusable artifacts orchestrated by the framework and thus enabling the developer to continue to benefit from all of our out-of-the-box capabilities, like  draft handling, side effects, always up-to-date SAP Fiori UX, etc.”

Learn more about where we are going

For details on the planned features for SAP Fiori elements and SAP Fiori tools, please see the relevant sections in the SAP Roadmap Explorer

Note that the innovations (road map items) for SAP Fiori elements are also part of the SAPUI5 road map and the innovations for SAP Fiori tools can also be found via the products SAP Fiori tools and SAP Business Application Studio.

Learn more about SAP Fiori elements in our expert paper.

If there is functionality you would like to see that will make it easier for you to build SAP Fiori apps, please let us know by putting your suggestion in the comments or by emailing us or anyone on the development team.

For the SAP Fiori elements and SAP Fiori tools development team, Peter Spielvogel and Stefanie Hager.