If I try to list down most commonly used or developed UI elements, I may think of the most repetitive ones, such as:
- Table/grid or a list displaying all the data
- Then I want my users to navigate to the details of these line items.
- I want my users to perform some actions like create, edit or delete data.
- I want my users to analyse the data.
- I want a dashboard for my users.
If you have any other idea of repeating UI elements or use case, please comment in the comment section 🙂
Fortunately,
SAP Fiori elements provide all these UI elements and more, as their different floorplans, using which you can render your UI without writing a single line of UI code:
Let me assure you, SAP Fiori elements do not only support happy flows or hello world use cases, but it supports really exhaustive features and use-cases. Please take a look at the
SAP Fiori elements Feature Map which lists all the features supported by SAP Fiori elements. It's not a drag and drop tool which renders your UI, rather it's one of the most powerful and exhaustive metadata-driven UI frameworks available today.
Now with this introduction, let me list down some other benefits of using SAP Fiori elements over conventional code-driven development for custom build applications.
Best Practices
SAP Fiori elements clubs the UX best practices from design and implementation best practices from engineering to provides a seamless and delightful experience for both i.e. the application developers and the business users.
So with SAP Fiori elements, you don't have to worry about where a particular action button should be placed or how your UI code should be structured or about how navigation between two application should be handled etc.
All these best practices and specification are forever-changing like for example in 2019 SAP also introduced Fiori 3 succeeding Fiori 2. Applications built on top of SAP Fiori Elements get these upgrades out of the box without any changes in the application implementation but just by upgrading to the
right SAP UI5 version. In the case of custom build applications, the application development team is responsible for adhering to these best practices.
Enterprise Readiness
Non-functional requirements like performance, accessibility, security, responsiveness, adaptability etc. may often be very tricky and will consume more man-hours than the functional requirements itself. For custom build applications, the application development team is responsible for adhering to these non-functional requirements. With changing times, topics like Security and accessibility are no longer just a good to have a feature but also a binding to the applications, for example, the European Accessibility Act.
SAP Fiori elements take care of all these non-functional specifications so
your implementation team can concentrate on a lot more complicated business logic.
UX Consistency
Maintaining UX consistency between different applications and cross-lob, in particular, could be
a very exhaustive process and might require very strict processes and D-Gates.
Failure to achieve a certain degree of UX consistency may not only result in
high user training expenditure, but may also result in lower productivity from business users.
All of the application developed with SAP Fiori elements will always be as
consistent as possible, without any effort from the application's engineering or design team.
Rapid Development
As we know SAP Fiori elements is a metadata-driven UI framework, which renders your UI based on your application manifest, service metadata and annotations, rather than application developers writing and maintaining thousands and Kilos line of code for SAP UI5 custom build applications. This development is even escalated more with Web IDE.
So with SAP Fiori elements, you can now productise an application not in months or years but in days and weeks.
Extensibility
SAP Fiori Elements is not rigid, rather it's very flexible and extensible at every layer. It supports application developer extensions for an application developer to incorporate very specific business demands. Fiori Elements supports WYSIWYG based extensibility via the
SAP Visual Editor and
Key user for customers and vendors. Even It supports personalisation for business users.
Scalability
Let's say you have developed a set of different application and business came back with some suggestions and changes. With SAP Fiori elements, It's quite effortless and quick to incorporate these feedbacks and changes compared to custom-built applications.
Maintenance and Support
Regressions and conflict resolution after upgrades are things of past with SAP Fiori Elements. As since you don't or have very less application-specific code to develop, hence you have very little or no effort for the maintenance.
With the
Diagnostic tool, It is as seamless to seek support for SAP Fiori Elements. It collects all the required information which will be useful for the SAP support team to fix your issue. Hence reduce the multiple ping pong between SAP Fiori elements support and application team.
How to get your hands dirty with SAP Fiori elements
Now since you know, that SAP Fiori elements can act as a wormhole to by-pass the implementation effort for many essential and vital requirements like enterprise readiness, UX consistency and other best practices and also help you to productise your application in a much shorter period compared to UI5 freestyle application. You might be interested to dig further into SAP Fiori Elements. I think below links could help you as much as it has helped me
Developing Apps with SAP Fiori Elements Official Documentation
SAP UX Engineering YouTube channel
SAP Fiori Elements Overview Page (OVP) : what and hows
SAP Fiori Elements Analytical List Page (ALP) : what and hows
Hope it helps !!
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