Extending SAP Build Apps Skills

Imagine you're developing a mobile app for your company's sales team. This app needs to display near real time customer data, update information, and integrate with other SAP or third party services. Traditionally, this required manually building backend services, provisioning infrastructure, and writing integration code.

With Visual Cloud Functions (VCF), you can visually create backend logic, define data models, and build integrations—all inside SAP Build Apps. This lowers complexity, accelerates delivery, and enables fusion teams to develop end to end apps while keeping the backend clean, governed, and cloud native.

Visual Cloud Functions provide a low-code approach to building cloud-deployed backends for your front-end SAP Build Apps applications. This empowers full-stack developers to independently create entire applications, reducing the need for specialized backend skills and accelerating development cycles.

Before Visual Cloud Functions, developers often needed to:

• connect to CAP services,
• model database tables manually,
• or rely on device storage for small apps.

These scenarios required more specialized backend knowledge. VCF reduces this complexity by providing:

• a built-in backend,
• visual data models,
• server-side logic, and
• ready-to-expose APIs

—all without writing backend code.

This is ideal for apps that require custom data persistence and logic but do not justify a separate pro code service.

Visual Cloud Functions support a wide range of extensibility scenarios, including:

Transform or combine data before exposing it to the front end.

Examples:

• reformatting dates
• merging two data collections
• filtering sensitive fields

Execute rules on the server rather than in the client.

Examples:

• validating customer input
• performing calculations
• enforcing business constraints

Server-side workflows or scheduled logic.

Examples:

• cleaning up data
• generating derived entries

Create tailored endpoints that expose only the data required by your app or workspace.

Visual Cloud Functions consist of four core backend areas:

Entities represent structured datasets similar to database tables. They define:

• the fields of the dataset
• the data types (text, number, boolean, date, datetime, UUID, list)
• the underlying schema stored in the managed PostgreSQL system

When additional transformation or data‑reduction needs arise, Extended Entitiescan be created. They allow you to:

• hide fields
• rename fields
• compute virtual fields using formulas
• expose a simplified or privacy‑filtered data view

Extended Entities do not store their own data—they are virtual layers built on top of native entities.

Functions represent backend logic created visually using a flow-based editor.

Typical use cases include:

• validating user input
• transforming data before saving
• performing calculations
• querying or updating entity data
• calling external REST APIs
• orchestrating conditional logic

Functions run server-side, ensuring a consistent and governed backend execution environment.

Deployments publish the latest backend version and make it available to your SAP Build App.

A deployment:

• captures all changes made since the last version
• analyzes whether changes are breaking or non‑breaking
• activates the new version
• ensures that entities, functions, and authorization rules take effect

Changes only become active for the running application after deployment.

Authorization determines which users can access or modify backend data.

Roles define what operations are allowed on each entity. Permissions include:

1. List – view all records
2. Retrieve – view a single record
3. Create – insert new records
4. Update – modify records
5. Delete – remove records

1. Open the Roles tab in Visual Cloud Functions.
2. Select Add Role.
3. Enter a name and description.
4. Assign permissions in the Data entity access tab.
5. Save the app.
6. Deploy the backend to activate the role.

Modified roles also require redeployment.

Roles can be assigned to:

• individual users (via email from IAS token)
• IAS groups
• custom identity attributes (e.g., Country = "DE")

Assigning Roles to Users:

1. Open the Users tab.
2. Choose Add User, enter one or more email addresses.
3. Select the role to assign.
4. Save and submit the changes.

Assigning Roles via Groups:

• Groups must match the IAS group name exactly.
• All group members inherit the assigned role.

Assigning Roles via Custom Attributes:

• Attribute names/values must match those defined in Cloud Identity Services.
• Enables context-based authorization (e.g., region-based access).

All authorization changes require a new deployment.

• Visual Cloud Functions enable rapid backend creation for SAP Build Apps without traditional coding.
• Entities manage structured data, and Extended Entities prepare data for frontend consumption.
• Functions implement business logic using a visual flow editor.
• Deployments activate new versions of backends and enforce stability.
• Authorization ensures controlled access through roles, user assignments, groups, and custom identity attributes.

Together, these four backend areas enable full-stack development inside SAP Build Apps—aligned with cloud governance standards.