Reviewing the Scenario and Planning the No-Code Extension

Almost any activity we perform in our jobs can have one or more systems and applications associated with it, and depending on your industry or line of business, those apps may need some additional capabilities. Therefore, in this unit, we will build a no-code SAP extension.

We’ll look at how building an SAP extension can help us to make more of the systems we already have, then dive into planning your SAP extension and building along with us, step by step!

In this unit, you will be using the SAP Build Apps system, which is available via SAP Business Technology Platform for enterprise customers. If you don’t already have access to that, please check the prerequisites section of the learning journey.

As a reminder, while the SAP AppGyver Community Edition you used in the previous unit offers a good basic experience, SAP Build Apps offers more enterprise-grade capabilities such as SAP system integrations and collaboration for fusion teams.

What is an SAP Extension?

Extensions consist of software that is developed to interact with and enhance the capabilities of core enterprise systems, such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Success Factors, SAP Ariba, SAP Business Technology Platform, and any other kind of resource management or business applications that your company might be using.

Why would you want to create an SAP extension?

Well, when it comes to a specific type of functionality or use case, it might not always be possible or even sensible to try and customize the entire core product or system itself to perform these new tasks, and a separate extension is more appropriate. That way, the main system can be focused on the core tasks it must perform very well, and citizen developers are free to build extensions that fit their specific needs.

SAP Sales Cloud is a cloud customer relationship management (CRM) solution that assists the daily activities of a salesperson. This includes communicating and collaborating with customers, supporting the lead-to-cash process and providing complete transparency on the current business.

The SAP Sales Cloud dashboard shows everything that is important for a salesperson's daily work: Relevant company news, upcoming activities, tasks at hand, and links to leads, opportunities, and quotes – and important KPI’s are displayed in detailed dashboards.

It´s easy to use the navigation to get to any specific information, at any time, like customers, contacts, or data that supports the sales process.

The scenario you will develop with SAP Build Apps is an extension to SAP Sales Cloud, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, with a list of appointments that we want to extract and create an app to display them as a viewable list.

We’ll begin the process with planning – a critical part of software development because it makes us break down the problem we’re trying to solve, as well as the application design, into smaller sections. We’ll plan the three main areas of application development – defining the user interface, logic, and data.

Sketch out the scenario to think through what you will build – an app that shows the data for the appointments by pulling it from SAP Sales Cloud system. Our plan has 3 steps to it:

1. Create a new SAP Build App to display the appointments
2. Make a connection from the SAP Build App to the SAP Sales Cloud OData API
3. Configure the SAP Build App to display the appointments data