My Experience with HANA Web IDE and Comparison with HANA Studio

[vivekbhoj]

Hi Everyone,

As some of you might be knowing that with HANA SPS06, SAP introduced Web IDE for SAP HANA and it had to be installed explicitly to access it.

With HANA SPS07, we get a new HANA Web IDE that is installed by default.

I couldn't try Web IDE on HANA SPS06, so gave it a try with SPS07 and wanted to share my experience and compare it with HANA Studio.

Web IDE is a lightweight browser based IDE for creating, editing and debugging development artifacts without using HANA Studio.

The URL to open the IDE is http://<hostname>:80<InstantNumber>/sap/hana/xs/ide/

As seen from the above figure, we have four tools - to access these tools we also have some pre-delivered roles that need to be assigned.

You can learn more about these roles and features of Web IDE from the below document from kai-christoph.mueller

HANA XS development with the SPS07 Web IDE (focus on debugging)

Lets start with Editor tool

On opening the Editor tool, we get to see packages and their content:

Editor tool is like the Content folder of our HANA Studio and shows all the development Objects - It gives us full access to the SAP HANA Repository and we can create, delete and rename packages here.

One of the features that I like most here is Delivery Unit Management

As we all know in HANA Studio, to create, change or remove a Delivery Unit, the easiest way is to go to Quick Launch tab and Click on Delivery unit and then below screen shows up:

We can also create as well as export Delivery Units using this Editor tool, for that we just need to R-Click on the Content folder

On clicking Create Delivery Unit, the below popup appears, where we can define Delivery Unit details

On clicking Export Delivery Unit, the below popup appears and then we can select the Delivery Unit that we want to export

But with the help of HANA IDE Editor, we can also assign a package to a Delivery Unit or unassign it from a Delivery Unit by just Right Clicking on a Package and then Selecting  Delivery Unit -> Assign or Unassign. This is not possible in HANA Studio as shown below

But it is possible with HANA IDE Editor

On clicking Assign, it gives the following popup and from the drill down option, we can select the Delivery Unit to which the package needs to be assigned.

Similarly on clicking  unassign a Delivery Unit, we get a popup as shown below:

Editor tool also has Search functionality and we can search any file

Search in HANA Studio is also there but it shows only Models, Tables and Column Views

Similarly we can also search for File Content in both HANA Studio and HANA IDE by Right Clicking on a package.

But HANA Studio triumphs HANA IDE with Quick Access option which has many features:

We also have some template applications present in Editor, for accessing them R-Click in the Content folder and select Create Application

Using template, I just created a HANA XS Hello World Template App inside test  package and following files were generated automatically

We can run this app directly on browser and we also get option to simulate SAPUI5 apps on IOS or Android

With HANA Studio, we can only run the file in Browser:

The JavaScript Editor present is very handy - it has syntax highlighting, code folding, code formatting, code checking and other features like HANA Studio

As shown in the below figure, editor is dynamically showing that Line 10 is missing Semicolon and while an artifact is being edited its name is shown in Yellow color as shown below

We can press "Ctrl + Space" for code completion similar to HANA Studio

The best thing I like about JavaScript Editor is that on pressing Save button - the Editor checks and activates the Object

On clicking a package, we create a new file  and by default it is a .js file and we can also change the extension and also revert it(delete)

For me the best capability of Editor tool is Version Management

We can see multiple versions of an artifact and then compare them and see what is different between the two versions.

For seeing Versions, just R-Click on a file and select Versions

Another awesome feature of HANA IDE is Multi File Drop Zone

To use this, we just click on the package and then we can drag and drop files into that package

Once files are copied, we can see notification below

And then we can see these files inside that package:

We can also see HANA Views using the Editor tool but they open in XML format

On clicking Settings button, we can change Editor settings and enable inactive testing

We can also directly open other tools from any IDE tool

On Clicking Information button, we can see FAQs and Text Editor Shortcuts

Lets look at the Catalog tool

The Catalog tool shows all the Schemas that we have access to and so we can view procedures, functions, sequences, tables etc

If we right click on any table, we can only generate Create and Select statements and also delete the files

In HANA Studio, we can generate Create and Select statements but additionally we can also use Visual SQL and do many other things as shown below

Using Visual SQL, we can create joins, select fields for output and test the result

But we cannot create a table using HANA IDE

Now Lets look at the Security tool

The Security tool shows all the Users and Roles

We can see any role or user and see all its priviliges

We can also see the Modeling role with HANA Studio and  we observe that we are not able to see Analytic Privileges in HANA IDE

We can also create new users and new roles and assign them roles and privileges

But we cannot set Auditing or Password policy using HANA IDE and can be done only using HANA Studio

Finally, Lets look at the Trace tool

Using the trace tool, we can view the XSEngine and Index Engine traces and can also set the Trace Levels

We can also directly access HANA Application Lifecycle Management tool through any of the Web IDE tools

Through this tool, we can perform a lot of operations - transportation, change management and also maintain delivery units

To learn more about it, you can refer to the below blog:

SAP HANA Application Lifecycle Management | SAP HANA

Conclusion:

For me the main features of HANA Web IDE are:

1.) Version Management and ability to directly make changes in the Server version of the Object - helps in resolving conflicts in Objects too

2.) The Text Editor of the tool is great and its best feature for me is that by only pressing "CTRL + S" we can check and activate the objects

3.) Debugging capability is also very good

4.) We can drop and drag and copy multiple files at a time in a particular package

5.) General User Administration can be done with ease using Web IDE

6.) We don't need access to HANA Studio and can access HANA artifacts anywhere on the go

We can conclude that HANA Web IDE is a great tool for developing XS based applications and for General User Administration

As we can see it is missing lot of features compared to HANA Studio

I know HANA IDE is not meant to replace HANA Studio and features like Modeling and Administration are not suitable for it as it is meant to be a lightweight Web based IDE

Hope to see further development in the Web IDE

Thank You for reading my blog

Regards,

Vivek