Testing workflow start UI in SAP Business Application Studio

Introduction

One of the usage patterns of SAP Build Process Automation is to utilize a custom UI5 application for initiating workflows. In this scenario you can create a UI5 application in SAP Business Application Studio (BAS) using “Workflow UI” > “Start UI” template.

However, attempting to test the app from BAS may lead to 404 errors, indicating that the route to workflow API has not been resolved.

Error testing from BAS

In this blog post, I will share how to test workflow start UI from SAP Business Application studio.

Prerequisite

• A process have been created in SAP Build Process Automation

Settings

Please follow below steps to enable testing in BAS.

• Create destination
• Configure ui5.yaml

Create Destination

This destination is only for testing within BAS. Once the application is deployed, the SAP Build Process Automation “service” will be used to call the API, as seen in the xs-app.json configuration below.

{
  "welcomeFile": "/index.html",
  "authenticationMethod": "route",
  "routes": [
    {
      "source": "^/bpmworkflowruntime/(.*)$",
      "target": "/public/workflow/rest/$1",
      "service": "com.sap.spa.processautomation",
      "endpoint": "api",
      "authenticationType": "xsuaa"
    },

First, create a service instance of SAP Build Process Automation with the “standard” plan and generate a service key for it.

Service instance

Next, proceed to create a destination using credentials from the service key.

Workflow destination

Important: the properties “HTML5.DynamicDestination” and “WebIDEEnabled” are required to make BAS aware of the destination.

Configure ui5.yaml

Add the following setting to ui5.yaml.

        backend:    
          - path: /bpmworkflowruntime
            pathPrefix: /public/workflow/rest
            url: https://spa-api-gateway-bpi-us-prod.cfapps.us10.hana.ondemand.com
            destination: workflowruntime #your destination name

The complete content will look like the picture below.

ui5.yaml

Result

As a result, the invocation of the workflow API becomes successful. Interestingly, although fetching xsrf-token failed, the actual POST request was successful.

Successful testing from BAS

Final Words

While the start UI can be tested in BAS using the provided settings, I haven’t found a way to locally test task UIs. To the best of my knowledge, task UIs can solely be tested from My Inbox app. If anyone has insights on how to test them within BAS, kindly share your knowledge. In the meantime, I will explore potential solutions.