
I haven't posted any updates on the Custom CDS Views app for a while now. It's not that the app does not evolve any more but the relation between developments under the hood versus features that are visible to you as a customer changes. Also the team is focussing on additional topics in the evolving area of developer extensibility.
So here is finally another update on the Custom CDS Views app including the recent features that will be shipped with 2502 as well as a selection of what has happened behind the scenes since 2308:
As the old Custom CDS Views app is not available any more to manage the legacy views, we introduced additional options to cover the missing functionality in the new app. You can now not only migrate views to the new app, but also delete legacy views or unfinished drafts without the need to migrate them first (2308).Delete Legacy Views
The migration functionality was also enhanced to now migrate almost every view created with the old app to the new app (2502). If you now trigger the migration, the view structure will be transferred to the new app, afterwards, the view will be analysed and then re-published (2402). The analysis checks if the legacy view can automatically be adapted to the latest modelling rules. Re-publish will then update the view and modernise the structure (e.g. update to view entity, update the access protection or resolve rework tasks if possible).Migrate Legacy ViewsIf the analysis finds issues that cannot be fixed automatically, the view will need to be adapted to the current rules manually. You will be supported by messages with instructions in the publishing log to change your view.
You may remember that we introduced scenarios with the new Custom CDS Views app. During the migration, the scenario is derived from various properties and from the usage of the CDS view. The only reason that may still prevent a migration is, if we cannot reliably derive the scenario. On the other hand this means that there is no usage of the view, otherwise we could have derived the scenario from the usage. In this case, you may want to consider to delete the unused view or to open a ticket (BC-SRV-APS-GKE) to get migration support.
In 2023, Simple Types were introduced as a CDS language feature to include the possibility to define types natively in CDS. These data types can be used as well in ABAP as also in ABAP CDS. For more details, refer to the Simple Types blog post from Andrea.
As also SAP begins to use this language feature in their VDM data model, we started supporting simple types with 2408. This is specifically relevant when they are used in parameters.
This does not only help supporting more modern VDM content, but when you do use simple types in your developer extensibility CDS views (and C1 release them), you will profit from the option to use it in a Custom CDS View as well.
Rework tasks help you to keep track of maintenance tasks for your Custom CDS Views. Since the beginning of Key User Extensibility, we introduced different types of rework tasks as well in the old but also for the new Custom CDS Views app. With the old app becoming obsolete, we took the chance to modernise and consolidate our rework tasks.Rework Tasks
With 2308, we moved the rework calculation away from a health check to a background job. This makes the calculation more robust & reliable. With this move, we also introduced the rework tasks in the productive system that you can see the need for maintenance specifically for your productive views as well. In the production system, the rework tasks are calculated once a week over the week-end. A calculation directly after each import is planned as well.
As we now resolve some of the rework tasks that were specific to the old app during the migration, we could get rid of these rework tasks and replaced them with one task that just reminds you on the migration of legacy CDS views as such (2402).
The rework tasks around the new access protection were also optimised. These tasks do publish a complete view stack when it is necessary. In case of a large network of views, this sometimes leads to the need to transport a large amount of views even though only one view was changed. As of 2308 this publishing process was streamlined and improved. It is now ensured that you only need to transport the views that needed to be changed (specific to your development) which also improved the performance and reliability of the process.
The Virtual Data Model deprecated elements and replaced them with new ones for quite a while now. Still, they were not removed so far. Now VDM is going one step further and started decommissioning elements. The Custom CDS Views app reacts a bit differently to decommissioned elements now than it reacts to deprecated ones. In a nutshell, we do not allow including decommissioned elements to Custom CDS Views and whenever you transport a changed Custom CDS view, you have to remove the decommissioned elements before.Decommissioned Elements
To improve dealing with deprecated & decommissioned elements, we did the following changes in 2402:
Whereas the raw data preview acts as a basic, built-in possibility to check the pure structure of the data, the preview via the separate Data Browser app was introduced as a more feature-rich alternative. Until 2408, it was only used to display the current Custom CDS View. Starting with 2402, it was integrated in the data sources tab as a possibility to preview other data sources (e.g. supported VDM views) as well.Preview Options
The selection of data sources was improved in 2308 already by adding the option to display and also to search and filter by components & packages. This allows you to identify and find related data sources more easily.Data Source Selection
The custom CDS Views app is now quite mature. Language features like explicit joins or unions would unduly increase the complexity of the key user tool and therefore remain reserved for the developer extensibility.
We will therefore in future mainly invest in better usability of the app as well as in updating and modernising existing language features.
Apart from the key user world, you will hear from me about new tools for the developer extensibility - especially for Embedded Analytics. Stay tuned 🙂
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