Learn to Create and Use SAP® CAPM Apps with SAP® BAS!
Hey there, SAP® Tech Masterminds! We’re thrilled to bring you a fun and easy two-part blog series. We’ll guide you through creating and using SAP® CAPM Services in SAP® BAS for your SAP® Fiori® Element Apps.
Whether you’re new to coding or a seasoned expert, these blogs are for you. Let’s get started!
Now that you’ve built your SAP® CAPM app, it’s time to put it to work. In the second part of our series, we’ll show you how to:
Connect your CAPM services to SAP® Fiori® Elements apps.
Turn your services into awesome, user-friendly apps using SAP® Fiori® Elements.
Follow simple, clear instructions to make everything work smoothly.
So grab your favorite snack, get comfy, and join us on this coding adventure. Stay tuned for the first part – it’s going to be amazing!
Also, to Learn Fiori® Elements using SAP® CAPM and SAP® RAP you can enroll in the course Learn SAP® Fiori® Elements where we will learn in a Step-by-Step Fashion the development of Apps Using Fiori® Elements.
For the best offers on the course check the Offer Page.
The final result will look similar to the screenshot below in the Navigation Details Screen. Based on the Nesting of Navigation the Final Result will differ.
Fiori® Elements Navigation Screen
Good practice is:
1. Not do the nesting more than 3 levels.
2. Not referencing more than 1 Reference Facets per collection or you will face rendering issues.
1. Create a SAP® CAPM Project to generate sample files and structure. In the BAS CLI you can write:
cds init sample-project
Some of the files created in the project like the data CSV file and the app folder will be added in the coming steps:
SAP® CAPM Project creation
2. Go to the db folder and create a file data-models.cds to add the schema:
namespace sampleProject;
entity Products {
key ID: UUID;
productName: String;
category : String;
price : Decimal;
description : String; // New field for product description
image : String; // New field for image URL
}
3. Add sample data values inside the data folder in a CSV file and name it project-Products.csv:
ID;productName;category;price;description;image
"e3b0c442-98fc-1c14-9fb0-c4e9b3c77c63";"Laptop";"Electronics";999.99;"High-performance laptop for professionals";"https://i.ibb.co/WWfNSgp/openui5.png"
"fe3a9ec0-93d6-2f3b-ad7c-c8f330b7606c";"Smartphone";"Electronics";599.99;"Latest model with advanced features";"https://i.ibb.co/WWfNSgp/openui5.png"
"b4e9b3c7-7c63-4e3b-0c44-29fc1c149fb0";"Coffee Maker";"Home Appliances";49.99;"Brews perfect coffee every time";"https://i.ibb.co/WWfNSgp/openui5.png"
SAP® CAPM Data Model
4. Create a basic service inside the srv folder in the file catalog-service.cds :
using sampleProject from '../db/data-model';
service CatalogService {
entity Products as projection on sampleProject.Products;
}
5. We have created a SAP® CAPM App to explore which can be used in a Fiori® Element Template, so let’s start making that. Note, that this SAP® CAPM App will be used in the Fiori® Element Template, so we need to keep the App running and create a new Project From Template which we will do next.
To run the App we can use the Start Script of the App from the package.json file:
Views are Projection over Data and are not Actual Data. Similarly, CDS(Core Data Services) are views which are projection over Database Tables.
With CDS View one can create a view by writing DDL Code which is easier to understand.
CDS Views can have a relationship with each other like association, composition, and also Join like Left outer Join, Inner Join, etc. Using this you can create complex data models.
In S/4 HANA® VDM is created with CDS Views. And it is one of the key selling points of S/4 HANA®.
VDM stands for Virtual Data Model, the concept is you do not expose a database directly to the outside world but you create views over the database and with the help of these views one can read data and update data.
Views are primarily used to read data and with the help of ABAP® code, you can update the data which is mostly in the case of Transactional Application.
The Update of data in Transactional Application in S/4 HANA® is done with AMDP, BOPF, ABAP® Restful Programming, etc.
If you want to see and learn CDS-Based Development Hands-on. You can also check out the CDS Professional Development course here. We have also other courses like ABAP® Restful here where we have covered the VDM in-depth and how one can create a transactional application with the Restful framework.
Advantage of CDS Views
The main advantage of CDS views is with the CDS view you can create full-fledged Data Models.
For example, imagine you have to create a data model for the Order to Cash process. Here let’s only consider Sales Order Part for now. In this case, you will have a Header and Item tables. Now in data modeling, you will be creating CDS view for Header Table and CDS view for the Item table. Then you will specify that they have a composition or association relationship. The CDS view which directly extracting data from the Database table is called Basic CDS View. These Basic CDS Views can remain the same for all the Projects. Developers can further extend the Basic CDS Views to create Composite CDS Views. This layer of CDS Views can be used in applications. One can again Create one more layer of CDS Views over Composite CDS Views called Consumption CDS view which will be Custom Build to be used in a specific application. The naming convention of the Basic CDS view is (I_*, example I_PurchaseDocHeader), composite is (I_*) and consumption is (C_*). These Hierarchies are referred to as VDM(Virtual Data Model) which is one of the key aspects of S/4 HANA®.
CDS Views are not dependent upon the database, so you can use CDS views over any SAP® Supported Database.
In CDS Views Client Handling is automatic, even if you want to ignore it in your code, it can be handled internally.
In CDS one can use Aggregation and Numeric Function.
In CDS View you can have a calculation field that can automatically calculate values-based upon every time an update of the value happens. This field can use Aggregation and Numeric Function as well. For example, if you want to Aggregate all the Item Price in Sales Order Header. This can be done with Aggregate functions. You can have a custom field in your Header CDS views with Aggregate functions to achieve this.
CDS views can be used in ABAP® Code to read data.
You can have complex Joins and Projection over the database with CDS View using CDS DDL Code.
CDS Views supports Open SQL Syntax. So, you can call CDS View with Open SQL in ABAP® Code.
CDS Views can also be viewed with SE11 T-Code Using CDS View’s SQL View Name.
CDS Views are Part of the ABAP® Data Dictionary.
CDS View can be easily exposed as oData Service by Just adding a single annotation as @odata.publish: true
And finally, the most exciting thing you can do is add semantic information to data, with information like how should the data appear in UI, what the data holds, is it a currency or timestamp, what should it be called in the UI layer, what is the sequence in which data need to be represented in UI, etc.
This semantic information is called Annotation. Annotations can be of different types and start with a @ symbol. With the CDS Views, one can also define the UI and Presentational aspects within the view. By adding the annotation to CDS View one can control how the data is represented in frontend logic irrespective of which application is using it.
To Learn CDS Development Professionally You can Enroll in our In-Depth CDS Professional Development Course here.
CDS Course | 18 hrs+
To learn how to use CDS in Transactional Application and Create Real-time Project with ABAP® RESTful you can enroll in our ABAP RAP Professional Development Course here.
In this 7 blog series, we are going to provide a small end-to-end scenario to work with SAP® CAPM. Here the usecase we are going to use is of Learning Management System(LMS) and build a Student List App and Deploy it to SCF.
Link to Master(or Main) Blog from which all the other blogs can be reached is Here.
If you wanted to check out the detailed course on SAP® CAPM the link is Here.
If you want to get learn SAP® Cloud Platform Development in Detailed then we have a 35hrs hands-on course Here.
For current offers and discounts check offer page Here.
In this section we are going to deploy our App to SAP® Cloud Foundry(SCF) in SAP® Cloud Platform(SCP)
Step 1: Building DB Artifacts
Till now, we were using sqlite3 Database in the local environment to test. Now we will use HANA® DB in Cloud or HDI Container(which comes with Free Trial of SCF).
To deploy our database artifacts i.e the cds which describe the structure and csv data. We need to first convert it to SQL, in which the HDI container/HANA® DB can process the creation of the table and loading of data.
For this we need to build our db artifacts, this we do by opening .cdsrc.json and adding the content as shown below
Note: In this case, we are telling the CAPM to create a build inside folder gen(which will get created once we run cds build/all command). And inside the gen folder, we will get db, srv and app build code.
For our purpose, we only need db artifacts so the above .cdsrc.json code can be just for db build as shown below
Now let’s start the build process which will read the .cdsrc.json file and create a gen folder and add all the build artifacts inside it
cds build/all
Step 3: Create the HDI Container in SCF
Now lets, create the HDI container in the cloud. We can do it manually with Cockpit UI or with CLI. Below us CLI Code which you can execute after you are logged in to your SCF account from CLI
cf create-servicehanatrial hdi-shared somedbname
In this case, the SAP® Cloud Foundry service is hanatrail, the plan is hdi-shared and somedbname is your HDI container name.
Step 4: Change package.json DB
Open the package.json file from the project directory and update the place we have sqlite to hana i.e. from "kind": "sqlite", to "kind": "hana",.
Here, we are telling CAPM App to use HANA® DB(or HDI) connection setting
Note: You can also run command to uninstall sqlite3 from the project if you face exit status 14 error while deploying the app to SCF with below command
npm uninstall sqlite3
or Just remove the sqlite3dependencies from package.json.
Step 5: Create YML
To deploy our App in cloud we can either use mta.yml or manifest.yml.
Note: .yml and .yaml are both extensions of YML descriptor file and are same. But mta.yml and manifest.yml are both different kinds.
You can think mta.yml as an advanced version of manifest.yml where you have more features like adding resource bundles, also when an app is deployed with mta.yml file then in client-side a compressed zip file is created with all Apps artifacts and then this zip file is deployed to Cloud. In the case of using manifest.yml file while deploying, all files are uploaded sequentially and no zip file is created locally as in the previous case.
In our case, we use manifest.yml file in the root of the project for simplicity as shown below
Create a new file named manifest.yml
touchmanifest.yml
Add Deployment information to manifest.yml file as below:
Here, we are first deploying the db artifacts which will create the tables in HDI container(or HANA® DB) and Add data. After that, we deploy the newApp, which will deploy our CAPM App.
Step 6: cf push and Test
For deploying App in Cloud you can use the command
cfpush
Which needs to be done in the root of the Project, where you see your manifest.yml file you created.
Output of the application will be
Fiori Launchpad:
Data of Students:
🙂 Congratulations! You have completed this series.
Before we end!
In this 7 blog series, we are going to provide a small end-to-end scenario to work with SAP® CAPM. Here the usecase we are going to use is of Learning Management System(LMS).
Link to Master(or Main) Blog from which all the other blogs can be reached is Here.
If you wanted to check out the detailed course on SAP® CAPM the link is Here.
If you want to get learn SAP® Cloud Platform Development in Detailed then we have a 35hrs hands-on course Here.
For current offers and discounts check offer page Here.
