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Hi, my name is Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy.
You are watching a video tutorial that is part of a series about the SAP Business Technology
Platform, SAP Extension Suite certification.
The topic of this tutorial is Tools This video was recorded in May 2022.
For the latest tutorials on the topic, please check the playlist.
As a reminder, we covered this in the introduction, here are the topic areas of the certification.
The tools topic carries an 11% weight, about 9 questions.
As with Cloud Foundry, the material for this topic area is scattered around a bit.
We are expected to be familiar to some extent with SAP Business Application Studio, and
the Cloud Foundry CLI, command line interface, and two cf CLI plugins.
Let’s start with Cloud Foundry.
BTP cockpit, main menu, Useful Links, Tools.
Brings us to the SAP Development Tools website, tools.hana.ondemand.com.
Under Cloud, section Getting Started with SAP BTP Cloud Foundry Environment, there is
a link to the Cloud Foundry CLI repository on GitHub.
There are multiple versions with instructions how to install the tool using either a package
manager, like Homebrew for macOS or an installer.
With a link to the Cloud Foundry documentation with a Getting Started section where you can
find information, for example, how to localize the CLI.
The Cloud Foundry CLI is a Cloud Foundry tool, not an SAP tool, so you won’t find this
documented on the SAP Help Portal for SAP BTP.
It is a command line tool, simple installation, and when done, we should be able to connect
with our local computer to the SAP BTP Cloud Foundry environment.
Executing cf returns a help menu.
Some commands have a shortcut, l for --login, for example
Here we have the usage: cf login -a API URL, username, password, org,
space.
The API URL, the API endpoint is listed on the subaccount overview page.
Copy/paste. and then either provide username password
on the command line, preferably interactively, or by using the --sso flag, which then prompts
us to enter a temporary authentication code, which in my case, with this browser, uses
a certificate to connect to the platform.
Copy/paste.
We are prompted to select the org, in case there’s more than one, the space, in case
there is more than one, and now we are connected: cf a list all apps, but there aren’t any
yet; cf s the services, the middleware, again:
no services found; cf m list the available services on the marketplace:
offerings and plans.
We can add services using the command line or the BTP Cockpit, same thing.
Now, of course, for one-off activities, using a web UI like the BTP cockpit probably the
most convenient, same holds true for those new to the platform.
However, for repetitive activities, for automation, CI/CD, continuous integration, continuous
deployment, we will cover this topic as well in a subsequent video, you probably want to
use command line and scripting.
Okay, next tool is the Business Application Studio.
Relatively new, released 2020, web-only, no installation, to which we need to subscribe.
It is included with the trial, but otherwise, same steps as with the Cloud Foundry environment,
or any other BTP service, for that matter, add the service plan to the entity, to the
subaccount, Note that the Business Technology Platform
uses the same metaphore of a marketplace, where we can subscribe to services, as we
just saw with Cloud Foundry.
However, these are not the same markets, we cannot use the cf CLI to subscribe to the
Business Application Studio.
It is not a Cloud Foundry service, it is a BTP service.
We could, but that’t beyond the scope of the exam, or at least not covered in the exam
training material, use the BTP CLI, another command line interface tool.
We can create, a subscription in this case, to the App Studio directly from the tile,
or we could select the tile, to get some more information about the available plans and
from here, we can navigate to the Discovery Center.
Here we have the page, the service catalog entry, for Business Application Studio.
The evolution of SAP Web IDE.
Those familiar with the Web IDE, might find this blog post of interest.
On the page we also find the links to the documentation, tutorials, the community home
page, pricing information, roadmap information, and so on.
Back to the cockpit.
Create -generic new instance or subscription dialog -a=nd what we get is a subscription
to a service.
Before we can access the app, we need to grant ourselves access, or, to be more precise,
as BTP subaccount administrator, we need to grant our subaccount users either admin or
developer access, or, another possibility, grant the extension deployer privilege.
You can select the role collection, edit, and add users, or preferably, user groups,
or, select the user and assign the required role collections (same thing), and to automate
this, you can use the BTP CLI.
Now we can return to the subaccount, instances and subscriptions page
Go to the application using the shortcut, the elipses, or the button (same thing).
Links to the documentation, the community, blogs, tutorials, demos, in the UI, but before
we can get started, we first need to create a dev space,
a pre-configured private environment, your own "virtual machine" on the cloud, where
you can develop, build, test, and run using pre-installed runtimes and tools, and guess
what, this includes the Cloud Foundry CLI, for example.
Give the space a name and indicate what kind of application you want to create: SAP Fiori,
which includes a number of extensions with some optional ones to add;
full stack cloud application, different selection; SAP HANA native application, now with the
calculation view editor included, SAP HANA database explorer, smart data integration
tools; SAP Mobile Application, or Basic.
Let’s try this first.
Create dev space.
Technically, a kubernetes pod is now launched in the background with the configuration we
requested There are some restriction in the trial environment,
as documented, up to 2 dev spaces, only one dev space running at a time.
You may recall this from one of the sample question.
Takes a few seconds.
The pod is running.
Select to access.
You can bookmark the URL and from here we can start developing apps, start from a template,
clone from git, import.
Users of Microsoft Visual Studio Code will recognise the user interface, same look and
feel.
Business Application Studio is based on Eclipse Theia, as done by other vendors, like IBM,
Red Hat, and Google, to name a few.
A terminal is integrated but when we try to run the cf command, the command is not found.
Let’s return to the dev space manager.
Delete the space.
Create a new one.
This time add the MTA tool, for multi-target applications, an SAP development concept,
which we will discuss in a bit more detail in another video of this series.
Enter the space.
Open a terminal.
Run the cf command and now we find the cf CLI included.
From the view menu, find command, we can also access a number of CF command shortcuts, set
org and space, login, with the API picked up from the trial environment.
Enter username and password, org and space, and now we are connected and we can run our
cf commands.
Obviously, there is a lot more we can learn about the Business Application Studio but
we are not expected to have completely mastered the tool for the exam.
We will return to the App Studio in some of the other videos in this tutorial series when
covering extension development But this is it for the tools topic area.
You can find the links to the resources mentioned in the description of this video below.
This video tutorial was recorded by Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy.
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