Day: November 15, 2017

At SAP TechEd Las Vegas this year Björn Goerke announced, among a lot of other great new things, the new SAP Cloud Platform SDK for service development. Generally speaking, it provides generic development libraries and tools such as OData services provisioning and consumption, business events and so on to enable application developers to easily create extensions on SAP Cloud Platform. In this blog I would like to provide you more insight about what the SDK does, how you can use it to build apps for SAP Cloud Platform and what resources help you to make best use of it.

Let’s first have a closer look at the scope of the SDK. As a “software development kit”, it helps you develop software, in this case apps which will run on SAP Cloud Platform. More specifically the SDK  at this point is a Java SDK and the resulting apps will run on SAP Cloud Platform, Cloud Foundry Environment.

Cloud apps are about providing and consuming services. This is where the SDK will help you by simplifying the development significantly. Apps built with the SDK can easily provision RESTful services based on open standard OData (V4) protocol, which is broadly adopted not only in the SAP world. The implementation for the different OData service operations (CRUDQ, actions, functions) can be done with very few lines of code, if it is not already done generically by the service provisioning framework of the SDK. Under the hood unsurprisingly we are using the Apache Olingo library for OData, which was largely contributed by SAP. The following code demonstrates some key attributes of the APIs of the SDK:

For the consumption of services again there are already powerful APIs for the most important datasources: OData (for instance for working with data in SAP S/4HANA) and CDS, which is the metamodel of choice now for business objects in SAP. The following self-explaning line of code shows an sample OData service request for retrieving product data from an S/4HANA system:

As you can easily imagine, as a Java developer you already now have some key ingredients for building what we call Extension Apps: these are apps, which provision services in the cloud (nothing special so far) but at the same time let you re-use all the data and processes, which you have already in place in your organization. Why bother building yet another store for products or business partners if you can simply use the existing one?

Beyond support for service-related development the SDK also offers you a growing number of capabilities which you will need for writing reliable, secure and manageable cloud apps.

So, when and how can you start using the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for service development?

You can start now, the SDK is publicly available on Maven Central under the GroupID com.sap.cloud.servicesdk and you can use it with your IDE of choice. It contains two archetypes: Quickstart (for your own project) and Sample (fully implemented app). We will continue to add functionality and datasources to the SDK and therefore you may want to come back from time to time to get the latest version.

In addition to the Javadocs that come with the SDK there is a detailed documentation on SAP Help Portal, which also contains currently four tutorials:

* Creating a Simple OData V4 Service That Exposes Mock Data
* Creating an OData V4 Service from an OData V2 Service
* Creating an OData V4 Service That Exposes a CDS Data Source
* Creating an OData V4 Service That Exposes Data From Multiple Data Sources

Also Arun Bhaskaran Nair from the development team has published a blog showing step by step how you in less than an hour can build an app with an OData service on SAP Cloud Platform by using the SDK.

Questions or feedback? Just Ask a Question, use the primary tag “development tools for SAP Cloud Platform” and the user tag “SAP Cloud Platform SDK for service development” http://bit.ly/2hDP1z3 #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

Some time ago I discussed SAP High Contrast Black, a theme that SAP has been providing in many solutions for decades.  A matching SAP High Contrast White has been long desired and with SAPUI5 version 1.48 has finally become a reality.  This blog brings you a first glance at High Contrast White and how it impacts your Fiori Launchpad and Fiori apps.

High Contrast White is an important new theme for anyone working on mobile devices in bright environments where there is dazzling and glare, such as on a mining site, or on a farm, or in city park, or on a container wharf.   

High Contrast White also helps anyone who find higher contrast helps them to see more details, such as people with severe short-sightedness, macular degeneration, glaucoma, and floaters/clouds in the eye. While these sorts of conditions can affect anyone at any age, they are particularly prevalent as we age.  So you may find your mature talent employees (over 45 years of age) may be particularly appreciative of a high contrast screen.

SAP High Contrast White is one of SAP’s newest addition to the Fiori Design Guidelines for accessibility users.  SAP High Contrast White is available for all Fiori and SAPUI5 apps in SAPUI5 and OPENUI5 as of version 1.48.

Given that version 1.48 has only been released very recently most customers are yet to upgrade to SAPUI5 1.48, so the easiest place you can see this is in the recently released SAP S/4HANA 1709 and also in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1708.

In this blog you will see some brief examples of:

* High Contrast White in the Fiori Launchpad
* High Contrast White in Fiori apps

And you will also find out how you can set select this theme:

* Setting High Contrast White as a user
* Setting High Contrast White as a developer

The screenshots you will see are taken from S/4HANA 1709.

High Contrast White in the Fiori Launchpad

In the Fiori Launchpad, you can see in this example primarily white tiles are shown with a black border.The currently selected tab appears as a mid-blue.

The focus indicator that shows you where the cursor is currently placed appears as black dotted line on white (to make it easier to see the cursor indicator is also 2 pixels wide rather than the usual 1 pixel used for Belize and Belize Deep).  In the example below, you can see the cursor indicator on the Unused Contracts tile.

Notice that semantic colors on analytics tiles still apply, and are just subtly adjusted shades.

Greens are #006362 (0% red, 38.8% green, 38.4% blue) compared to Belize’s #2B7D2B (16.9% red, 49% green and 16.9% blue). Reds are #AB0000 (67% red) compared to Belize’s #BB0000 (73% red).

Naturally the colors of your corporate logo and any other images are unaffected.

On static tiles, you can see icons are in minimalist black on white, as in the following example.

High Contrast White in Fiori apps

In the example below you can see high contrast white applied to one of the S/4HANA Fiori Manage apps.  This particular app, like many of the Manage apps, uses the popular List Report floorplan.  Here we see the list shown with a grid table.  Once again you can see minimalist black text and lines on primarily white screen. The position of the cursor is highlighted in orange – here we see the cursor selecting a whole row to expand it to see more details.

Often details are shown using an Object Page – another very common Fiori floorplan.  On an object page again you can see High Contrast White appears as black text on primarily white screen.  The current tab is emphasized with a bold underline. Major section (aka facet) headings have a grey background.

Thumbnail images are unaffected.

In analytical charts, a deep color palette is applied to make comparison of charts and lines clearer, and a little more interesting.

This new color palette is particularly obvious on Overview Pages.

Setting High Contrast White as a User

It’s easy to turn on this new theme.  Just to go to the Me Area of your Fiori Launchpad and open the Settings dialog. You’ll find the settings for themes in the section Appearance.  Simply choose SAP High Contrast White.

Hint: You might notice there are 2 SAP High Contrast Blacks.  The older sap_hcb (marked with an artist pallet icon) and the newer sap_belize_hcb (showing the theme background colour in a circle icon).  You are recommended to use the updated sap_belize_hcb for Fiori to pick up on the latest Fiori settings and to smoothly navigate to classic UIs.

Setting High Contrast White as a Developer or Administrator

You can switch on the High Contrast White theme by appending the URL parameter to your Fiori Launchpad URL:

sap-ui-theme=sap_belize_hcw

And of course, just like High Contrast Black you can add sap_belize_hcw as a supported theme in your manifest.json file.

Becoming a SAP Fiori Accessibility guru

You’ll find more in the SAP Fiori Accessibility wiki.

Screenshots from S/4HANA 1709

Brought to you by the SAP S/4HANA RIG http://bit.ly/2juHROi #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

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