Taking a Tour of SAP Build Apps

Generally, you start with a link to the SAP Build lobby, where you can manage all your projects–whether they are SAP Build Apps, SAP Build Process Automation, or SAP Build Work Zone projects.

With SAP Build Apps, you can build two types of projects:

• An application.
• A backend, that is, a database for storing data for an application.

Let's start with the SAP Build Apps tool for creating the front-end of an application, and later in this lesson, we explore the tool for creating backends.

When you choose Create, you get a window where you can choose what type of project to create. To create an application, you choose Build an Application → Web & Mobile Application.

After entering a name for the app, you get the SAP Build Apps home page for the app.

To get your bearings, here's a view of the home page for an app (with the logic pane at the bottom closed):

There is also the logic pane, where you indicate how the application reacts to the user and other events. By default, this is closed, but you can open it up by choosing the link at the bottom of the canvas.

The logic pane works like the canvas, with widgets on the left that you can drag into your logic pane and that you connect to one another. These widgets are called flow functions– because you are creating a flow of actions, starting from the triggering event through all the flow functions you connect to it.

The components area on the left of the screen contains all the UI components for bringing onto the screen.

There are three tabs:

Core

Contains about 25 basic components, like buttons and input fields.

Marketplace

Contains many more complex components that you can install into your app. Choose Marketplace to view a whole world of components.

Installed

Shows all components that you have installed, both core and Marketplace components.

The following video provides a quick tour of SAP Build Apps.

SAP Build Apps lets you create your own data sources–you can design data tables, called entities, and populate them with data. These data sources can then be used in your applications, instead of you relying on only data from external sources.

When you choose Create in the SAP Build lobby, you can instead choose Build an Application → Application Backend.

The user interface is divided into three main parts, as can be seen in the tab at the top of the page:

Explanations:

1. Entities: Database table that contains tabular data.
2. Functions: Actions that can use the data but also make calculations and return subsets of the data based on parameters sent from the application.
3. Deployments: When the entities and functions are ready, you must deploy them. Once deployed, they can be used by your applications.

We won't be creating a backend in this learning journey, but you should know that you can easily create your own data and functions for use in your applications.

You have taken a tour of the user interface of SAP Build Apps for building the user interface and logic of your application front-end.