Today, customers and partners have two options if they want to extend SAP S/4HANA Cloud: Key user extensibility and side-by-side extensibility.
The SAP S/4HANA Cloud extensibility is far from the extensibility scope of an on-premise ERP:
Limited scope of Key User Extensibility.
Limited SAP S/4HANA Cloud remote APIs.
Not all extensions can run side-by-side.
The restricted SAP S/4HANA Cloud extensibility is assumed to be one of the adoption blockers for SAP S/4HANA Cloud or for the partner ecosystem.
As a solution, a third extensibility option is introduced: developer extensibility. Developer extensibility adds the ABAP developer role to the existing key-user role to build extensions directly on SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Developer extensibility reuses the development model from the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) ABAP Environment and is available to customers since 2018.
To implement developer extensibility, a single development environment, ABAP Development Tools (ADT), the Eclipse-based ABAP development tools is provided. SAP GUI will not be allowed.
For developer extensibility, many objects (such as BAdIs, behavior definitions, CDS views, and so on) from SAP S/4HANA Cloud are released so that customers and partners can build their extensions on top of them. If you try to access a not released SAP object in custom code, then this is blocked by syntax or runtime errors.
Identifying the Released Objects
Watch the following video to learn about how to identify the released objects and find released APIs for SAP S/4HANA Cloud ABAP environment.
Find out the Released *RAP Business Objects (RAP BOs, or RAP Facades) for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Developer Extensibility
Watch the following video to learn about how to find the released RAP Business Objects for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Developer Extensibility.
Congratulations! You have now learned about the released APIs for SAP S/4HANA Cloud ABAP environment.