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thomas_jung
Developer Advocate
Developer Advocate

With the recent release of HANA SPS 10, its time once again to give a quick look at the highlights of some of the new features. This blog will focus on the new development tools features in HANA SPS 10. I will say up front that the amount and scope of additions in SPS 10 for the developer topic isn't as large as what we saw in SPS 09. Now that isn't to say we aren't investing. In fact we have some really big things in store for the future and it just so happens that most of our development teams were already working on SPS 11 and beyond. Therefore you will mostly see catch up features and usability improvements in SPS 10 for the development topic area.

SAP HANA Web-based Development Workbench

Calculation View Editor

The first area I want to touch on is the calculation view editor. The calculation view editor was first introduced to the SAP HANA Web-based Development Workbench in SPS 09; but it wasn't feature complete.  In SPS 10, we've spent considerable effort rounding out all the missing features. I won't go into details of all the new modeler features here; as that topic is actually covered separately by other colleagues.  However I still wanted to point out that now you should be able to create and maintain most any calculation view from the web tooling; make complete end-to-end development in the SAP HANA Web-based Development Workbench a possibility.

Auto Save

One of the architectural differences between a local/client tool and web based is fundamentally how they react when they get disconnected from the server or encounter some other unforeseen technical issue. In the SAP HANA Studio, a disconnect or crash often still meant that your coding was safe since its first persisted on your local file system. However IDEs in the web browser need to take other measures to ensure your content isn't lost. With SPS 10, we introduce the option to auto save your editor content in the local browser cache.

This is a configurable option which isn't enabled by default since some organizations may have security issues with the fact that the content is stored insecure in the browser cache. However if you enable this option and the browser crashes, you accidentally close the browser tab, or you lose connection with the server; your edited content isn't lost. Instead the "local version" is visible in the version management tool and can be compared to the active server version or restored over the top of it.

GitHub Integration

Another major new feature for the SAP HANA Web-based Development Workbench in SPS 10, is GitHub integration. Although you can't replace the local repository with Git or GitHub (yet), this functionality does allow you to commit or fetch entire package structures from the public GitHub repository.

Its easy to use because its so nicely integrated into the SAP HANA Web-based Development Workbench.  Just choose the parent package from the Content hierarchy and then choose Synchronize with Github.  You can then choose the Github repository and branch you either want to commit to or fetch from. Personally I've already used this feature to share a few of the demo/educational projects which we use for the openSAP courses.  Also you can do version management from the SAP HANA Web-based Development Workbench between your local versions and the version of the object in the GitHub (GitHub version is the one with G prefix :

Quick Fix

Most developers have a love/hate relationship with ESLint and other suggestions and warnings. While we like the idea that these suggestions improve our code, we don't like the little red flags hanging around telling us that we have yet more work to do.  This is where the new quick fix option in the SAP HANA Web-based Development Workbench is so nice. You can select multiple lines in JavaScript file and choose quick fix. The system will then apply the fixes it thinks are necessary to remove the ESLint markers. For many small, stylistic warnings; this can be a great way to clean up your code in one fast action.

JSDoc

JSDoc is a standard for formatting comments within JavaScript which can be used to generate documentation. It is how we generate the JavaScript API documentation found on help.sap.com. Now we integrate the generation of JSDoc directly into the SAP HANA Web-based Development Workbench.

It works for XSJS, XSJSLIB, and client side JS files. The JavaScript editor has a new option to help with the generation of JSDoc compliant function comments. There is also an option to generate a JSDoc HTML file for all the files within a package.

SQLScript Editor and Debugger

There are several enhancements to the SQLScript Editor and Debugger in the SAP HANA Web-based Development Workbench in SPS 10. You can now set breakpoints and debug from the editor without having to switch to the catalog tool. We also see full the semantic code completion in the SQLScript Editor. For more details on these enhancements, please have a look at rich.heilman's SQLScript SPS 10 blog: New SQLScript Features in SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 10

Data Preview

The data preview tool in the SAP HANA Web-based Development Workbench has a couple of new usability features.  First there is the option to allow for the editing or creation of data directly from the data preview. This probably isn't a tool that you would want to give to end users to maintain business data, but for developers and admins this is great new tool to quickly enter test data or correct an emergency problem.

The data preview also introduces advanced filtering options to put it closer to the content preview features of the SAP HANA Studio.

SAP HANA Studio

As has been apparent for a few Support Package Stacks, most of our investment hasbeen going into the web tooling and not the SAP HANA Studio.  SPS 10 is no exception, but still we see a few usability improvements in the area of the Repository browser tab.


We wanted to streamline the start up process, so every system connection automatically shows up in the Repository browser.  In order to edit files, you no longer have to create a local repository workspace. In SPS 10 you just start editing and you will be prompted to create the local workspace.

We also bring over for the folder groupings for system from the SYSTEMS tab.

Also added a new options for filtering, grouping and searching files from the Repository browser.

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