MTA development support in VS Code

[martinc_mb38]

Business Application Studio has support for creating Multitarget apps (MTA) and components.

It does not seem that this same support is available in VS Code.

I do not see any additional VS Code plugins. Using the Business Application Studio desktop client in VS Code to connect to a BAS development space does not bring that functionality into VS Code either.

Can anyone confirm? Is there something I perhaps do not know about?

[BoyanVelinov]

Hello,

As far I know, MTA tools can be part only in Business Application Studio and they are not exposed to be provided into VS Code.
The same question was asked before some time: 
https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blog-posts-by-sap/sap-business-application-studio-multitarge...

What you can do into VS Code is the following:

1. Manually create the required source code. To produce your custom artifacts, use a build technology of your choice.
2. Manually maintain your MTA development descriptor file mta.yaml . It serves as input for MTA build with Cloud MTA Build Tool (mbt). mbt can be used to build the MTA archive (MTAR)  into VS Code. MBT can be invoked from the VS Code Terminal.
   When "mbt build" is used, the input is source code + mta.yaml, where the result is MTA archive
3. Deploy the build MTA archive (MTAR) with Multiapps CF CLI plugin - "cf deploy" gets the MTA archive as input and trigger deployment to Cloud Foundry MTA Deployment Service. "cf deploy" can be used in VS Code Terminal.

The suggested approach lacks of the well-integrated UI into IDE, templates for MTA deployment descriptors and context menu for MTA build and MTA deploy, However, MTA build and deploy into BAS are using exactly MBT and Multiapps CF CLI plugin under the hood.
Also you can take advantage from the syntactic validation of MTA deployment descriptor. It should come out of the box for VS Code and uses the schema defined for mta.yaml:
https://www.schemastore.org/mta.json

[martinc_mb38]

Thank you for the feedback.

Are there any plans to provide the plugins to support MTA development in VS Code in future? Otherwise, what is the point of using VS Code, if MTA is the recommended way to go? Then, presumably, everyone should just use BAS and be done with it.

Also, it would be nice if the process of local development could be simplified by providing an easy way to set up proxies to BTP destinations from within the local environment. Where would one go to suggest that?