Again a release?

You might be asking yourself right now, wait a minute, wasn’t it just 2 months ago that the SAP Fiori Elements feature showcase app with RAP was initially released? How could there already be a new update?

As promised, with the continuous growth of SAP Fiori Elements and ABAP CDS annotations we intend to incorporate new features into the showcase app regularly, so that you as a developer will be kept up to date with the latest UI features that are possible with ABAP CDS annotations. (And if you have no idea what I just said, read this blog post to find out what this feature showcase app is.)

To coincide with the recent delivery of SAP BTP, ABAP Environment (aka Steampunk) Release 2302, read on for a summary of what you can expect.

Side Effects

Up until now, it was only possible to define side effects by adding it via the local annotations file. What are side effects you ask? As an example, when you change the value of a field and in the backend you have a determination that also calculates/changes another field, without side effects there would be no trigger to the frontend to automatically reload the new value of the affected field. You would not see the changes until you have refreshed the page.

Now you can do it from the backend easily, just by defining it at the behavior definition (BDEF) with a few lines of code, like below.

side effects {
   action doSomething affects field shouldBeReloaded;
}

In the showcase app we show a few examples, one of which you can see in the animation below.

Side Effects – Action affects field

Action Overload

Action overload sounds a lot like method overloading in Java, but don’t get the wrong idea. An action overload is showing an action button at the child entity table in the object page, which executes an action that has been defined at the parent level. A use case for this could be, you would like to create a child instance but also would like some values from the parent instance. With the normal create operation this would not be possible.

Child created with the description ‘Root entity 510..’, taken from the StringProperty of root

Localized Label from Data Element for Action Parameter

If you use a data element as the data type for a field in the action parameter (defined in abstract entities), the text label will now be derived from the data element. This means that you can provided localized labels by maintaining it at the data elements.

Recommended Data Types

If you don’t usually know which data types you should use for your table fields and how it is mapped to the oData data types, we now have a section with fields using the recommended and released data types in ABAP Cloud.

Data Types and how it looks in the UI

Hiding Standard Operations

When the CRUD capabilities have been disabled, this will merely disable the create/update/delete buttons. If you would like to hide them completely, there are now annotations that can do that.

Update button is hidden while action is disabled because of update capability

Both update and delete buttons are hidden

Address Facet

You can show a formatted address in a section of the object page using address facet.

Address facet

Feature Control

We show you some of the possible ways you can define feature control on instance level for fields (like readonly or mandatory), or operations and actions (enabled or disabled). This is done with a combination of static and dynamic feature control, defined in the BDEF.

By the way, this was reported/requested in the GitHub repository so if you have any feedback, please also make use of this channel.

What else is new?

• If you scroll through the updated Wiki Guide, you’ll notice that a few of the documented features have screenshots now. All of the newly released features have screenshots to make it easier to visualize what they look like in the UI, and eventually also for the other features.
• If you think the screenshots look different than what you see in your version of the app, you are absolutely right. What you see is the SAP Horizon theme, which has not yet been configured for the Fiori Elements App Preview of the Service Binding. A quick fix? Add on the URL parameter sap-theme=sap_horizon each time you start the app preview
• If you already have the previous version of the app in your system, run the data generator again after you have done the pull and activated the objects.

So pull the new 2302 release from GitHub branch ABAP-platform-cloud and again, fee