Extending SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition using SAPUI5 adaptation projects

[elisabeth_riemann]

You can now work with SAPUI5 adaptation projects to extend your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system by creating application variants that fulfill the specific business needs of different business roles, groups or users, organizational units, and countries. For example, you might want to create an application variant to simplify and streamline a specific process by hiding fields not required by casual users, visualizing data as a chart, or changing a responsive table to a grid table to make information easier to process.

In an adaptation project, developers efficiently use the original SAP Fiori application together with its OData service and application logic to define changes that are specific to the application variant only. After deployment, both the source application and the newly created application variant exist with distinct titles and can be made available to the relevant business users through uniquely named application tiles in My Home, the new starting point for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

Fig 1: Create new SAPUI5 adaptation project in SAP Business Application Studio

Fig 2: Relationship between source application (blue) and application variant created by SAPUI5 Adaptation Project (green).

Cloud upgrade safe

To comply with automated Cloud upgrades and ensure the stability of your extensions, application variants created with SAPUI5 adaptation projects contain a runnable snapshot of the original (base) application containing all UI artifacts and a local copy of all UI annotations. In other words, SAPUI5 flexibility safely separates your extension code from the original application lifecycle, provided you follow the upgrade safe compatibility rules and best practices for controller extensions.  

After a Cloud upgrade, developers can test the application variant in SAP Business Application Studio and, if there are no issues, they can deploy it again to benefit from the latest SAP enhancements to the original application. For more information, see Check Whether the Base App of an Adaptation Project Is Up-To-Date.

Get started

Learn how to create an app variant via SAPUI5 adaptation project by completing these step-by-step developer tutorials https://developers.sap.com/group.sapui5-adaptation-projects.html.

For more information, see: Extending an SAP Fiori Application for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition  

To check whether an SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition application supports extensibility via SAPUI5 adaptation projects, look up the app in SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library and refer to the Implementation Information under Extensibility (Extensibility via SAPUI5 Adaptation Project: Supported) for example Manage Customer Contracts.

Fig 3: SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library: Implementation Information

If the SAP-delivered application you want to extend with an application variant is not yet supported, please let us know by submitting a request here: Influence Opportunity Homepage - Customer Influence (sap.com).

With the addition of SAPUI5 adaptation projects (part of SAPUI5 flexibility), SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition supports both developer extensibility (see Extending an SAP Fiori Application for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition) and key user extensibility options (see Adapting SAP Fiori UIs at Runtime - Key User Adaptation).

[SachinArtani]

Hi Elisabeth,

The adaption project is making a copy application though using standard OData service. As you said - "After deployment, both the source application and the newly created application variant exist with distinct titles". This existed in SAP S/4HANA 2302 as well. How is it different in SAP S/4HANA 2402?

As per my understanding, the point of 'upgrade safe' comes up when we extend the standard app and use that only, not when we use a copy of it.

Is it like the feature is now available for public cloud while it was already there for private cloud?

[benderskiy]

Hi @SachinArtani,

you are right, the feature of extending standard apps using developer adaptation was not available fpr public edition before. Before 2402 it was only available in S/4HANA Cloud on-prem and private cloud as well as for BTP CF.

Wrt. to "copy" approach: it  is only applied to in case of S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Both in on-premise and private cloud no copy of UI artefacts are created and the app variant only contains deltas to the base up, thus upgrades of the extended apps are happening automatically once system is upgraded. To avoid issues, customers are sill advised to develop extensions in the compatible and resilient fashion as described here. As well as developers can test and fix extensions created via adaptation project before upgrading productive system.

With S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, the copy approach is taken to avoid any "day-1" impacts and ensure that extensions created via adaptation project are not crashing after the system upgrade. Note, that adaptation projects are still only containing deltas to the original app and customers, when notified about the upgrade of the original app, can easily test and update their app variant to be "in-sync" again afterwards as described in this page. All this allows safe upgrades with no risk to the productive usage. We also plan to add an option to add automated tests and automatic upgrade pipeline to avoid manual effort going further - will be announced via the roadmap, stay tuned! 

Hope, this was answering your valid concerns!

[Lueberrueck]

Hey Elisabeth,

I have also been looking into this topic recently. Perhaps you could add what the difference is between synchronous and non-synchronous views. I think many people stumble over it.

[benderskiy]

Hi @Lueberrueck,

this is an important question, since asynchronous views are not only a prerequisite for controller extensions, but are in general a best practise when building modern SAPUI5 applications.

You can find more information on instantiating views in the UI5 demokit: Instantiating Views and Routing Configuration. If you want to check, whether an existing application contains synchronous views, Support Assistant offers a rule for it: "Asynchronous XML views".

Hope, this helps!

Best Regards,
Mikhail