Using SAP Build Apps for SAP S/4HANA Extensions

You have want to create an application that supports a warehouse operator handling the goods receipt process. As a citizen developer, you want to use SAP Build Apps to build the user interface and to create a persistence layer. You must access the purchase order details from SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Therefore, you want to use SAP BTP Connectivity.

In the last unit, you learned how a citizen developer can extend your SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems by using Key User extensibility. Another way of developing extensions is using SAP Build Apps. In contrast to key user extensibility, SAP Build Apps provides you with tools to build a new decoupled application that can access data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud. By leveraging SAP Build Apps, you can take advantage of its easy-to-use development tools to build customized applications that meet your unique business needs, while ensuring you keep the core clean.

Before we jump into the specifics of building extension applications, let us briefly recap the capabilities of SAP Build Apps.

SAP Build Apps is a visual programming environment that enables both citizen and professional developers to create custom enterprise software with no need to write code. With SAP Build Apps you can do the following things:

• Create unique user interfaces with a drag-and-drop tooling.
• Define the logic of your app visually and make use of already preprepared functions.
• Use Visual Cloud Functions to build business logic and data models.
• Connect your application to SAP BTP destination service, which allows you to securely access SAP solutions.

As you build a decoupled application, you must connect your application to your SAP S/4HANA Cloud system, so they can exchange data. In SAP BTP, you use destinations to define connections for outbound communication from your application to remote systems.

You can define the connection details of your target SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems such as the endpoint URL or authentication credentials, enabling you to specify which APIs you want to expose from the remote system.

When you define the destination in SAP BTP, you can add the connections as data source to SAP Build Apps. This enables you to use all the data you have exposed from SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Before you can access the data in your app, you must specify the authentication. By default, no authentication is enabled in SAP Build Apps, so everyone can access the app. While you build an extension application, you want to assure that the person using the app is authenticated to access the data. Therefore, you can enable the SAP BTP authentication in SAP Build Apps. Once enabled, SAP Build Apps automatically adds an extra page to your project, which verifies user credentials from their SAP BTP account. When a user opens your app, this page opens automatically. Upon successful login, the initial screen closes automatically.

SAP Build Apps is a visual programming environment that allows citizen developers to create custom enterprise software without writing code. You can use SAP Build Apps to build enterprise extensions of your SAP systems. To connect your application to SAP S/4HANA Cloud system, SAP BTP destinations define outbound communication. You can also enable SAP BTP authentication to ensure only authenticated users can access the app.

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