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stefaniehager
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
The forum is about to close, final exams have been graded, we had more than 18.000 learners signed up by the end of the course, and I have packed up my home studio; our Developing and Extending SAP Fiori Elements Apps openSAP course is now done. I hope you had as much fun and learned as much as I did during the process. In this blog post, I’ll summarize what I enjoyed most about the course, and point you to some additional resources so you can continue your learning and how to address any additional questions.

In case you missed the course, it is now available in self-paced mode including the possibility to get a certificate and to do all the exercises. While the forum will no longer be available, you can post your questions here in the community.


 

Active forums brought up some good discussion topics

The course forum was very active with almost a thousand questions and we did our best to answer them in a timely manner. It was a bit overwhelming. But we loved it, because it showed us that participants appreciated the exercises and we received lots of very valuable feedback, which we have either directly incorporated in the exercises, forwarded to the right channel within SAP or put into our backlogs (features, documentation, further training material). On some we are still working.

While the openSAP team has closed the forum for the course by now we nevertheless want to encourage you to keep asking questions. You can do so in our SAP Fiori elements and SAP Fiori tools community. If you add the user tag ‘openSAP Fiori elements’ we will know that your question relates to the course.

What I learned during the course

On the technical side, I got confirmation that learning how SAP Fiori elements is quite straight forward, if you get appropriate guidance and have technical experts around who you can ask questions. This became apparent from the questions in the forum. By the middle of week 1, I’m sure most of the course participants realized that this is a development tool for developers. Yes, it requires significantly less coding than traditional freestyle development, but you are still working in IDEs and creating applications.

This was a complex course on a technical topic. This is one of the reasons we had so many different presenters. Any openSAP course has many moving parts with the slides, recordings, assessment questions, web site, communications, and quality control. peter.spielvogel wrote about this in his blog post about what happens behind the scenes. The project management challenge of managing many workstreams simultaneously does not vanish when the course goes live. Marcus Holger Erb and ruxandra.zamfir1  seemed to be online around the clock orchestrating responses to the questions and following-up on any technical issues that arose.

The scope and complexity of the course allowed me to meet many new colleagues, some of whom are outside the sphere of my daily work. Their passion and knowledge of their respective topics was so impressive. It was great to see people step up to share their knowledge with the community by answering questions or voicing their opinions in the forum.  I’d like to express my special thanks to all the content experts and unit owners and in particular to Stefan Engelhardt – his contribution to the forum has been invaluable, oliver.graeff from the SAPUI5 team, raz.korn from SAP Business Application Studio, andre.fischer and carine.tchoutouodjomo from the ABAP Platform team – the list is of course much longer. But not only colleagues from SAP contributed – special thanks also to plyhui21 who has answered many questions in the forum and thus helped his fellow learners. And many others did too.

Additional resources

There was a strong ask for even more content and deep dives on a whole bunch of topics. We will follow-up on this, but we’d also like to point you to some resources to help you continue learning, whether you prefer to deep-dive on a specific topic, read curated articles about various development topics every other month, or interact with peers who are also developing SAP Fiori elements apps.

SAP Fiori elements

The most important source for additional information is our SAP Fiori elements documentation with the feature map as the recommended starting point if you are looking for a specific functionality.

Sign up for the SAP Fiori development newsletter to get the latest product updates.

Or join the SAP Fiori elements roundtable group, where you can discuss your development projects with peers from other companies and hear updates from the SAP development team.

As a quick start we offer hands-on tutorials, that you can do on your own schedule (similar to the openSAP course, but not graded):

and an expert paper which provides a concise summary of SAP Fiori elements

SAPUI5 Flexibility

Continue your learning journey at SAPUI5 Flexibility - All You Need to Know, which is the central entry point to all information related to SAPUI5 flexibility. And on SAPUI5 as such, there is of course https://ui5.sap.com and the SAPUI5 Community page.

Thank you

On behalf of the entire team that brought you the openSAP course on Developing and Extending SAP Fiori Elements Apps, thank you for spending the last month with us and let us know how we can support your learning journey. Also, we are eager to see the apps you build, so please share the screens, along with some background on the use case in the SAP Community.

Cheers,

Stefanie Hager
4 Comments
Hello Stefanie, (and OS team)

Thanks very much for the very kind honourable mention of myself on this blog. I really appreciate it. Was very glad to help in the initial-to-mid stages of this course.

I did enjoy this particular course amongst the many I have attended and must have been a huge effort to organise (standing ovation & applause to the OS team). There has been some topics raised by some at the end which indicated the course did not go into certain areas deep enough for them but imho I think the course has achieved its main objectives. I certainly will continue to experiment with BAS/VS Code in conjunction with Fiori Tools in my own time locally as I do not have access to a workplace (backend) SAP system. It was a very good structured introduction into FE (w Fiori tools) capabilities and not too taxing from a seasoned developer's POV.  There are bound to be more questions but surely it will have been raised/covered in the discussion forums. So a big well done to the team for delivering such a fine course.

Big thanks to Marcus Erb too.

Kind regards & cheers, Peter Li
EkanshCapgemini
Active Contributor
0 Kudos
Hi,

I am currently taking up this course as it is re-opened and I was working on some requirement of Fiori Elements. I really like this course as it is more technically aligned than many other OpenSAP courses. This course actually dives into code and helps to create something meaningful rather than just marketing another SAP product as is the case with many other courses.

I hope we will get a version 2 of this course soon where we dive deeper in extensions and more practical scenarios.

Thank you for the amazing course.

BR, Ekansh
former_member737108
Discoverer
0 Kudos

There is nothing said in this course about most required real-life scenarios, like extending customer projects. For example, such common functionality as Attachments are not covered by Fiori Elements, and can be implemented with extensions only. Which are, traditionally for SAP, documented in poorly and in very specific way. Like there are some snippets, but no explanation in which file and section developer has to apply it.

So, the major issue is that creators of the course believe for some reason that any customer need can be covered by SAP template. They live in their own close world and too far away from the real life. The most suprising is that graphical editor is available for Adaptation Projects only! This is a true attitude to custom development, ain't it?

And the major issue of those who writes documentation in SAP is that they believe that a reader must have a strong knowledge by the time of reading. They cannot even imagine that a reader opened a documentation because he/she does not know the topic and expects to find a comprehensice information there.

stefaniehager
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
Hi Andrei,

Thanks for writing.

You are correct that there are many business scenarios that our customers encounter. Some will fit the SAP Fiori elements floorplans, some will not. At SAP, we find that we can use SAP Fiori elements for around 80% of the apps we build in SAP S/4HANA.By now we have built more than a thousand SAP Fiori apps based on SAP Fiori elements. In our experience we often need to extend the templates with some custom coding / controls and to accomodate this we have been investing more in the ability to go beyond our standard floorplans - if this sounds interesting, please check this blog.

One goal of SAP Fiori elements and SAP Fiori tools is to reduce the amount of coding skills required to build apps. So, we offer several capabilities with that in mind. Here is a short video on the XML annotation language server. The LSP module provides code completion, annotation definitions, and quick fix actions.  Guided development provides step-by-step guides for implementing functionality in SAP Fiori development projects. It is aimed at people of all skill levels from beginners to experts. Here’s a blog post that summarizes the newest capabilities. Furthermore we have released experimental features in the page editor.

Also, we have been taking the request to improve our SAP Fiori elements documentation seriously and have been providing e.g. the feature map and the feature showcase. And we intend to continue on this journey.

best regards,

Stefanie