SAP Extension Lessons Learned and Looking Forward

We’re done building our first extension with SAP AppGyver. Let’s quickly recap what we did to build the app and then let’s take a look at where to go from here.

To build the app we started with putting the UI together in SAP AppGyver using components. We also touched on the powerful feature of customizing the default components.

Then we configured the OData API as a data resource, which enabled us to pull the data into SAP AppGyver. After that it was time to bind the data using text, formula, and repeat bindings to make our UI come alive.

Finally, we could see that everything was working by pulling data from the API and displaying it in a custom UI in an SAP AppGyver application.

This is of course just the beginning. In this unit we showed you an example using one single dataset from one single OData service, but in the real world we have many SAP systems each with it’s own API, and these enable all kinds of integrations and interactions to take place. The SAP Sales Cloud API itself contains a vast number of services that can be used for different purposes.

By the way, there’s a saying "there’s an API for that" and, as we’ve seen, that often holds true!

At SAP and for many other kinds of data across industries and around the world, the availability and number of APIs are growing at a rapid pace, so keep exploring as you learn to build your own apps.

There are also a few things we didn’t cover in this unit. When we’re building such an extension for productive use, one big topic is security. For example, the API we connect to might require some type of authentication credentials or another authorization mechanism. Since security as a topic is very big and often requires particular expertise, we encourage you, as a citizen developer, to work with your IT administration and system owners to help you review your plans as well as the execution of your extensions and applications.

The good news is that when you're building on the solid foundation of SAP Business Technology Platform, many crucial enterprise requirements, such as security, are already being delivered as part of the platform.

Hopefully going through this unit has made you curious about SAP extensions, APIs and SAP AppGyver. If that’s the case, then one of the best things you can do is to join the SAP community at community.sap.com

On SAP community you can search for the topics you’re interested in, for example "SAP AppGyver OData", and you’ll find lots of interesting results including blog posts, webinars, tutorials, and videos, created by community members and product experts, as well as questions asked and answered by the community. Interesting journeys often begin by asking questions! So even if you don’t feel like you could take on producing an SAP extension yet, you can always take the first step and ask questions. You will often find people who are asking about the same topic or trying to achieve a similar outcome.

Also keep your eye out for future SAP AppGyver enablement sessions and hackathons, which are a wonderful way to understand the platform more deeply and get up to date information on the latest developments.

Thank you for joining us for "Build your first SAP Extension with SAP AppGyver" and let’s meet again soon!