ABAP development tools for Visual Studio Code: Version 1.2 released

[thomasalexander_ritter]

What happened since the last release?

Link to the extension.

Welcome back after the summer period! Hopefully you had a great time in the sun. We did not take a break and kept on working hard on the next version. It is available on the marketplace, now.

We heard your feedback. The additional object type support in version 1.1 made the extension a lot more useful for the ABAP developer community. With version 1.2 we continue this trend. It adds support for additional 23 object types. It features the first ABAP specific views and most importantly it updates the bundled MCP server with additional tools which will unlock the full power of all AI agents including Claude Code!

Some of you might wonder why this release took longer than the last ones. After the initial release we are now back to the regular three months rhythm that you know from ADT for Eclipse. It allows us to keep both products in sync and release new versions is parallel.

SAP TechEd Berlin is around the corner. We will have a demo station: „Build agents, workflows, and applications (AD)“. Stop by and have a chat. Let's talk VS Code, AI and how our tools can help you get things done!

What gets shipped with this release?

The following list only shows the major new additions. Of course, lots of smaller fixes, tweaks got added as well. See our what's new page for the full list.

Additional object type support

The following object types got added with full CRUD support:

Core ABAP
Transaction, Package, Software Components Relations, Transformation

CDS
Annotation Definition, Scalar Function Definition, Dynamic Cache, Static Cache, Entity Index

Data Dictionary
Data Element, Table technical settings

App Infrastructure 
Application Log Object, Archiving Object, Message Class, Background Processing Context, Application Job Catalog Entry, Application Job Template, Business Configuration Maintenance object

Fiori / UI
App Descriptor Item, Page Template, Space Template

Extensibility
BAdI Enhancement Spot, BAdI Enhancement Implementation, Predefined Field Enabling

The first ABAP specific views

Beyond pure object editors, the new release 1.2 brings several of the "classic" ADT views to VS Code for the first time.

Transport Organizer

First version of the transport organizer, so you can see and work with your transport requests without leaving VS Code.

ABAP feeds

First version of the feed reader for all available feeds such as short dumps, the gateway error log, system messages, ...

Timeline (Version history)

Lots of you requested this one. Version history view, letting you compare previous versions of an object.

SQL notebooks

A twist on the ADT for Eclipse SQL console. For VS Code we are integrating the SQL console using the VS Code notebook feature. It allows you to run ABAP SQL queries against the system database. Jupyter notebooks are a powerful concept. Make sure to look at the official VS Code documentation to get the most out of this integration.

Activation log

The activation log got refined, so you can inspect activation results and errors directly.

HANA source code search

If your system has the source code search enabled then the new command allows you to use it in VS Code.

Usability improvement for system connection handling

We received quite some feedback for this new option. Adding a new destination and tweaking the settings can now be done via a dedicated option for the "New Destination..." command. Previously, it required editing the destination file directly.

A major update of the bundled MCP server

The update is so BIG that we decided to create a separate blog for it! You can find it here.

What's next?

Have a look at our ABAP Cloud Roadmap page to see what comes next. Be aware that the MCP tools are getting listed under the AI section.

Provide feedback and influence our product backlog!

We welcome your feedback! Feel free to use the comment section or create a customer influence request to let us know which features you are missing the most. Your input will help us prioritize the feature backlog for the next releases.