So you're telling me SAP has developer code for Android?

[josh_bentley]

Yup!

Thanks for reading.

Just kidding.

 

I wanted to come up with a title for this blog post that really encapsulated the experience I had at SAP's Sapphire Now conference this year and I think I did just that. I was honored to help staff the show floor in the SAP Design/User Experience area and was amazed at how many great customers I got to meet.  The staff floor section I was working had lots of information and experts relating to our newest release of Fiori, version 3.  One of the things I was helping to showcase was the Fiori Mentor application from our SAP Design team, Product Manager Santosh Kikkeri.  What's amazing about this application is how it takes a simple end product, an SAP Fiori app,  and does something beautiful, it explains how to design that app, in a SIMPLE way.  If you are looking to add an SAP functional application to your mobile users, or you are trying to explore complex integrations from multiple sources in a single app, Fiori can help.

 

The thing that really jumped out at me from interacting with so many amazing people was the following question: "How do I actually get Fiori to work?"

So let's unpack that question the same way I did in Orlando.

1. Okay, may I ask what products/versions of SAP you are working with now?


2. Are you in the process of migrating to S4?


3. Are you looking to stay on premise or moving to the cloud?


4. What other SAP products do you want to let your users connect to from their devices?


5. What other third party apps do your employees use?

The list could go on further, but in most cases that was enough for me to peel the onion and see how exposed their developers were to our newer technologies.  A lot of the attendees had a use case where they were using SAP R3 and have never explored Fiori on premise or cloud.

Fiori was released in 2013, but a lot of SAP customers have not explored how to implement an updated web/mobile User Interface to their SAP systems with Fiori.  I'm not saying they have to use SAP Fiori, and I am not saying they haven't used another method or app, but there were people who didn't even know where to start.  This points to two action items in my mind:

1. I need to work harder at getting the word out about all the things I am exposed to here at SAP.


2. SAP needs to produce more blog post, tutorials and code samples as "templates" for our customers to get started.  Once those things exist, see action item 1.

So to that end, I wanted to share a few screenshots on the SAP Fiori Mentor App for Android and how they can be used to jump start your development.

 

Here is a sample of SAP introducing the developer to our color schemes.  Notice how the Hex codes are included and we list the SDK version for Android.  The idea is to give the developer a set of standards so the users of Android **cough cough, and Apple, cough cough** are presented with the same look and feel.



 

Another screen shot of an Android tablet shows how a user contact card would be implemented using google's design principles.  This is how a user of a Fiori application on any device (web or mobile) would expect to interact with this data.  Note the layout options for phone and tablet, but also take note of the upper right option to: SEE CODE.



 

So lets look at the code:



You should take away a few things here.  A developer who is using the SAP SDK for Android with our associated plugins will now have the ability to take a code sample straight from the Fiori Mentor app and export that code sample.  This isn't meant to export a working app, instead it's meant to do what I mentioned above, be a TEMPLATE.  If you are using something like Sketch on a Mac (or Zeplin on a PC) for rapid design, then our Fiori Mentor is a great add-in to jump start your development.

 

Finally, here is a link to Santosh's great work on SAP Fiori design.  Please explore it and the SDK for Android.

 

Happy coding!