ABAP Development Days 2022

Now the actual SAP disclaimer would follow, as many things were only announcements and demos and are not yet available. Therefore, the little information to you that a lot can change during development at SAP.

Strategy

After the welcome, we started with the strategic orientation of the cloud products. The focus was primarily on the ABAP platform and how this should develop over the next few years and what it primarily makes available in the cloud. As you probably already know from us, embedded steampunk has been a hot topic for the S/4 cloud. Finally writing extensions directly in the SaaS solution of an S/4 system. It is always important to ensure that you work directly on the system and not in a side-by-side solution like in the current ABAP environment. With this, you can access and use many more shared objects.

ABAP Environment aka Steampunk

Some new features for the ABAP Environment have also been announced for the future, as well as some details from the May release of the platform. Here are the points in a nutshell:

• Transport of roles - Previously, only import and export was possible on the systems, now transport via gCTS should also be possible.
• Generators - The new generator for creating business configurations (SM30) is now available for customizing tables up to two levels. Furthermore, even simple RAP objects can be generated automatically, everything from the basic table.
• Tree Views - SAP Works on displaying data as a tree structure via RAP and Fiori Elements. This project is quite complex, but is currently already in progress.
• Events - processing and generation of events via RAP is also in the works, which can then be used to use event mesh in the cloud. CAP can already process events today, this should now also be possible via RAP.
• BLOB (Binary Large Object) - The support of large binary objects (streams) will come as a standard in RAP this year, so that, for example, fast file uploads can be implemented in the app.

ABAP Test Cockpit

The ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC for short) will also experience some innovations in connection with the cloud. It is planned to provide a central ATC in the cloud, which can manage cloud and on-premise systems at the same time. Further quick fixes are planned in connection with this, in order to automatically replace the tables in the code with the corresponding CDS view.

Furthermore, reference was made to the open source project Code-Pal, which is currently being developed by SAP and free ABAP developers. This is about an extension of the ATC to include additional checks in connection with Clean ABAP to help developers switch from old to new coding and to give many tips.

Demos

Furthermore, there were again two practical demos for the participants to try the system themselves. In the first demo you could take a closer look at the RAP Generator and try it. In the second demo, you could implement a BADI in the cloud system with Embedded Steampunk and use the new RAP facades via on-stack development to call the standard interface from an in-house development.

RAP

The ABAP RESTful Programming Model (RAP for short) will continue to gain in importance because it quickly makes new applications available, but also grants access to the standard. New SAP applications are developed in RAP and make the application available, but also make BAPIs obsolete as they are then used in their place. As a third factor, you can also make the API available at the same time and all this with a basic development.

Code-Cleaner

A mysterious tool/plugin was also teased by SAP. The code cleaner will probably support Eclipse as an independent plugin and should help to upgrade the pretty printer and the quick fixes. This allows old statements to be converted into new statements and the code to be formatted according to Clean ABAP. Unfortunately, the colleagues from SAP haven't revealed more, except that it might be published this year.

Conclusion

This year's Development Days were a lot of fun in the hybrid version, the demos and announcements made you want more. We think the whole thing is slowly developing in the right direction, but SAP still has a lot of work to do before the majority of customers can do with the product what is already possible with an ECC system today.