Getting Started with SAP Business Application Studio

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to understand SAP Business Application Studio and how you can use it for development.

Introducing SAP Business Application Studio

Before we get started developing data models in SAP HANA Cloud, we should introduce the key tool we will use, SAP Business Application Studio.

SAP Business Application Studio is a very powerful, web-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that is used to develop all components of a modern, full-stack application including the interface, the application and the database layer.

SAP Business Application Studio supports development of cloud, on-premise and hybrid applications that integrate SAP and non-SAP technologies.

SAP Business Application Studio is probably the only development tool that you will ever need as it includes a huge number of features to support many development scenarios. One of those scenarios is data modeling in SAP HANA Cloud. This is the scenario we focus on in this learning journey.

A screenshot of SAP Business Application Studio, showing the Action bar, the Explorer Pane, and the Welcome tab with the some of the key startup actions.

SAP Business Application Studio is based on Visual Studio Code, which is an open-source software project started by Microsoft. It is widely adopted by the development community and is popular choice for developers because it allows them to plug-in their favorite extensions that provide additional tooling for their development projects. SAP and third parties provide many plug-ins for different types of SAP development projects to increase developer productivity.

SAP Business Application Studio provides text and graphical editors to create development artifacts, plus a command line interface (CLI).

A key feature of SAP Business Application Studio is the native Git support for source file version management. Git controls are embedded into the Business Application Studio.

Note

Web IDE for SAP HANA can also be used for modeling in SAP HANA Cloud, but is not recommended as it misses many additional productivity aids and features that supports the modeler. Web IDE will not be developed further and Business Application Studio will be the tool that receives all new features. SAP Business Application Studio is the recommended tool for data modeling in SAP HANA Cloud.

Getting Access to SAP Business Application Studio

SAP Business Application Studio is provided as a web-based application, with the back-end running on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). You subscribe to SAP Business Application Studio service at the BTP sub-account level. You do this in the BTP Cockpit.

Before you can launch SAP Business Application Studio from your browser, the following steps are required. Some relate to the BTP account or sub-account, others are specific to the user that will use SAP Business Application Studio.

A table showing the required steps in SAP BTP before you can work in SAP Business Application Studio. The steps are separated between BTP Account and Subaccount step, and User Membership and authorization setup.

When these steps are complete, you are ready to launch SAP Business Application Studio.

A screenshot of the SAP BTP Cockpit showing how to select an SAP BTP account and subaccount, and how to find the link to launch SAP Business Application Studio. Watch the video below for more details.

To launch SAP Business Application Studio:

Select a global account.
Select a sub account.
Select services of the subaccount.
Select the service category Instances and Subscriptions.
Select the Subscriptions tab.
You should see SAP Business Application Studio in the list where you can click on the launch icon.

Note

As soon as SAP Business Application Studio is started, make sure to bookmark the page in your web browser or keep the link in whatever location. In future, you do not need to enter SAP BTP before connecting to SAP Business Application Studio. You just have to follow the link and provide your BTP user credentials (if there is no Single Sign-on in place).

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