Moving/Co-existence of SAP Web IDE and SAP Business Application Studio(BAS)

Problem:

If you have HANA 2 or HANA Service you are used to SAP WEB IDE to create content for the database and/or applications.

Since quite a while a have also Business Application Studio(BAS). This allows to create the same content but with modern interface and a much richer developer experience.

How can you move over from SAP WebIDE to SAP Business Application Studio or work in parallel in both environments.

Solution:

Use GIT as the exchange platform for the content. Now you can change the design objects, source code, HTML and so in both IDE environments.

You can also import and export content but it is assumed that you have a versioning tool in place.

Setting things up:

SAP WebIDE:

As for GIT usage please look up other tutorials

In SAP WebIDE there a 4 places where you can check / change your git parameters or execute git commands:

Global Preferences

Project Settings

Project Context Menu

Git pane / History

Now on the business application studio this is centralised in on perspective:

GIT perspective in Business Application Studio

From here you can connect to the remote GIT address as:

Set a remote repository

Now that everything is set up the work can start:

Step 1: Push the content from WebIDE to GIT:

Push content from WebIDE to GIT

View the content in GIT:

WebIDE content now in GIT

Now use the project in BAS and change something like this string to string(100):

Use project and change in BAS

Now the content is send back to GIT (synchronise)

Synchronise the BAS changes with GIT

This change is now reflected in GIT:

Changes from BAS viewed in GIT

So we are back in WebIDE and can see the changes that are done in BAS also in WebIDE:

Changes arrive back in WebIDE

Summary:

If you have different code creating or editing tools, the GIT environment (or compatible others) allow to keep track of the changes from multiple sides.

In particular with WebIDE and BAS this allows to switch to a modern environment. The used artefacts are the same. However BAS is much more feature rich with complementary other public components or even own written extensions and tools.

So if you develop on HANA Service you can switch now.

For XSA (WebIDE) SAP will allow an upgraded BAS version that is supporting XSA / HANA 2 connectivity and deployment later this year.