Appgyver project import/export

quovadis · ‎2022 Dec 09

Pre-requisites:

Access to SAP BTP Free Tier account with SAP Build Apps subscription. You may refer to this excellent blog post, namely SAP Build Apps Free Tier Individual Access | SAP Blogs to help you get started.

Access to SAP Appgyver community edition.

Disclaimer:

The ideas presented in this blog are personal insights thus are not necessarily endorsed by SAP.

Images/data in this blog post is from personal SAP BTP Free Tier account. Any resemblance to real data is purely coincidental.

Access to some online resources referenced in this blog may be subject to a contractual relationship with SAP and a S-user login may be required.

Appgyver project import/export

The project Import/Export has been one of these long awaited features to help safeguard your investment by providing an easy project backup, exchange and collaboration functionality. All in one.

Please refer to the Appgyver official forum announcement here: https://forums.appgyver.com/t/import-export-is-now-available/19366

Let's assume you have already started and/or completed a number of apps with SAP Appgyver community edition.

And you would like to further explore/add SAP Business Technology Platform features available with SAP Build Apps Free Tier edition.

The project import/export documentation makes it clear how to export a project from a SAP Appgyver community edition apps gallery, namely from https://platform.appgyver.com/apps.

However, you may be wondering how to import a community project into SAP Build Apps Free Tier edition?

Good to know:

The development lobby of SAP Build Apps Free Tier has just added the export/import of projects to help migrate the apps from either SAP Appgyver classic or community editions.

Please read here: Migrate to SAP Build Apps | SAP Help.

This way you can manage the projects and their apps uniformly through the lobby access.

Putting it all together

When you login to SAP Build Apps you are granted access to a so-called development lobby.

Your SAP Build Apps development lobby url will be as follows:

https://<tenant>.<region>.build.cloud.sap/lobby

The lobby is where you can create new (empty) build projects and/or manage the existing ones:

However, the app development is done using the design time build environment.

As soon as you click on the project name link above you will be redirected to SAP Build Apps composer pro design time environment, as follows:

https://<tenant>.design-time.<region>.apps.build.cloud.sap/builder/applications/<project>/pages/1

Good to know:

SAP Build Apps Composer Pro design environment offers access to SAP BTP integration features like SAP BTP authentication and SAP BTP destinations which are not available with the community edition composer.

Interestingly enough, the development lobby, at least in its current version, does not support the project import/export or copy app functionality.

Initially, I was thinking if I created an empty app in the lobby as a shell for my application I would be able to import a previously exported community app into it. But this does not seem to be possible at all.

However, with a bit of digging around I managed to find a different way, namely by creating a new app from the design time context as follows:

https://<tenant>.design-time.<region>.apps.build.cloud.sap/builder/applications/new

As a result I created a table with the urls of the preview dashboard, apps gallery with export and a new application with import between SAP Appgyver community edition and SAP Build Apps Free Tier edition.

SAP Appgyver community edition	SAP Build Apps Free Tier
`https://platform.preview.appgyver.com/` `dashboard/`	`https://<tenant>.preview.<region>.apps.build.cloud.sap/dashboard/`
`https://platform.appgyver.com/apps`	`https://<tenant>.design-time.<region>.apps.build.cloud.sap/apps`
`https://platform.appgyver.com/builder/` `applications/new`	`https://<tenant>.design-time.<region>.apps.build.cloud.sap/builder/` `applications/new`

Well, it looks like this is bypassing the lobby.

However, after a closer examination of the custom SAP IAS application entries it looks like lobby, apps preview dashboard and design time environment have a dedicated SAP IAS application for each of them to act as a dedicated SaaS service provider (with a user login).

Conclusion.

Indeed, SAP Builds Apps Free Tier looks like a very good deal. Are there any caveats?

I would say the only single caveat with SAP Build Apps Free Tier edition is the number of free builds you can have as depicted below.

I personally think two successful builds per target platform/device is a very low limit.

Thus, as we are talking about personal use. Why not having this limit set to 10 or even a higher threshold to start with ? Or simply have a charge per additional successful build, if for personal use?

Last but not least, I hope you have enjoyed reading this blog and that it will help smooth the transition from Appgyver community edition to SAP Builds Apps Free Tier and Paid editions.

Feel free to ask questions and provide feedback in the comment section of this blog.

See all my piotr.tesny#content:blogposts or my lcnc ones only.