10    Creating and Extending Fact Sheet Apps

This chapter demonstrates how to create and extend a fact sheet app and provides a complete example app to illustrate the extension process.

In this chapter, we’ll show you how to create and extend fact sheet apps. We’ll start with a brief introduction into the various layers of the system landscape of fact sheet apps, and we’ll highlight the steps to create and extend them. To recap, fact sheet apps display contextual information about central objects used in your business operations. You can drill down from one fact sheet to another fact sheet, and you can call fact sheets from SAP Fiori launchpad. Fact sheet apps run only on an SAP HANA database, and they require an ABAP stack.

Figure 10.1 shows the system landscape of fact sheet apps. The landscape is comprised of two layers: the UI layer that contains the product-specific UI add-ons, SAPUI5 control library, and SAP Fiori launchpad, and the SAP Business Suite layer that contains the search model.

Fact sheet apps are created or extended from annotation files in an XML format; these files are based on semantic and object structure information. A fact sheet app is represented by a combination of a search model, OData service, and Business Server Page (BSP) application. Fact sheet apps can be extended by enhancing one or multiple layers. As explained in Chapter 9, you can create new SAP Fiori apps from scratch or extend existing SAP Fiori apps.

Before we dig deep into the creation and extension process, we need to enable the SAP Web IDE fact sheet editor app, which is covered in Section 10.1. In Section 10.2, we’ll teach you how to create a fact sheet app using an existing search model, and at the end of this section, we’ll highlight the steps to deploy the app to the ABAP Repository. In Section 10.3, we’ll move on to the extension process. Section 10.3.1 provides an example based on the Sales Order fact sheet app to show you how to extend a search model and create connectors using the search and analytics modeler and the connector administration cockpit tools. SAP Web IDE is still a young product, and it’s being developed at full speed by SAP. The goal of this chapter is to introduce you to the templates you can use to create or extend SAP Fiori fact sheet apps. In Section 10.3.2, we’ll show you how to enhance the app using the Existing Fact Sheet Application template and a Modification Free Fact Sheet Application template, and then we’ll explain how to deploy the extended app in Section 10.3.3.

Fact Sheet Apps Architecture

Figure 10.1    Fact Sheet Apps Architecture

Checklist

You’ll use the following tools in this chapter:

10.1    Enabling the SAP Web IDE Fact Sheet Editor App

In Chapter 8, we introduced you to SAP Web IDE and walked you through the various options available with this tool. Next, we need to enable the SAP Web IDE fact sheet editor app to create or extend fact sheet apps. Follow these steps:

  1. Log in to SAP Web IDE.
  2. Navigate to Tools • Preferences from the menu bar (see Figure 10.2).
    Adding Plugins from Preferences

    Figure 10.2    Adding Plugins from Preferences

  3. Select Plugins.
  4. In the pop-up page, enable the Fact Sheet Editor plugin, and click Save (see Figure 10.3).
    Enabling Fact Sheet Editor Plugin

    Figure 10.3    Enabling Fact Sheet Editor Plugin

  5. Refresh your browser to view the fact sheet app plugin.

You’ve successfully enabled the SAP Web IDE fact sheet editor app. Next, we’ll dive into the fact sheet app creation process.