In the fast-evolving world of enterprise applications, delivering a consistent, user-friendly, and scalable user experience is a critical success factor. SAP Fiori Elements offers a powerful framework to build enterprise-grade SAP Fiori apps quickly and efficiently, with minimal custom coding. It helps organizations accelerate development while ensuring a standardized user experience across business applications.
SAP Fiori Elements is a low-code application development framework provided by SAP that enables developers and business users to create SAP Fiori apps based on pre-defined floorplans. These floorplans are templates with standardized UI patterns and behaviors, adhering to SAP’s Fiori design guidelines.
Instead of writing custom UI code, developers use metadata annotations in CDS (Core Data Services) views and OData services to define how data is displayed and interacted with. The Fiori Elements framework interprets this metadata and automatically generates the corresponding user interface.
- Rapid Development: Significantly reduces development time with reusable templates.
- Consistent UX: Ensures compliance with SAP Fiori design principles across all apps.
- Scalability: Supports large enterprise deployments with consistent design and behavior.
- Maintainability: Easier to update and upgrade compared to fully custom UI5 apps.
- Lower TCO: Reduces development and maintenance costs by minimizing custom code.
SAP Fiori Elements offers several standardized floorplans to support common business scenarios:
- Presents a list of items with powerful filtering and sorting capabilities.
- Users can drill down into individual object pages for more detail.
- Ideal for scenarios like viewing lists of sales orders, invoices, or materials.
- Displays detailed information about a single business object.
- Structured into sections and subsections.
- Often used in conjunction with the List Report floorplan.
- Consolidates contextual and actionable insights from various data sources.
- Uses cards to display KPIs, charts, and lists.
- Supports role-based dashboards for decision-makers.
- Combines visualization and analysis capabilities.
- Allows users to explore data via charts and drill-down into transactional details.
- Ideal for KPI monitoring and exception handling.
- Designed to present a list of items requiring user action or decision.
- Supports quick processing and filtering.
- Useful for managing tasks such as approvals or issue resolution.
The development of Fiori Elements apps typically involves:
- Defining a CDS View in the backend with annotations that describe data semantics.
- Exposing the CDS View as an OData service.
- Creating a Fiori Elements app in SAP Business Application Studio or SAP Web IDE using the relevant floorplan.
- Enhancing the app (if needed) with custom logic or UI extensions via SAPUI5.
The app then automatically renders based on metadata, without the need for extensive front-end development.
SAP Fiori Elements is ideal for:
- Standard transactional and analytical applications.
- Apps requiring consistent UI and UX across departments.
- Rapid prototyping and deployment in agile environments.
- Applications built on SAP S/4HANA or SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform).
SAP Fiori Elements offers a smart, scalable approach to building enterprise-grade applications with less effort and greater consistency. By using pre-defined floorplans and metadata-driven development, organizations can deliver intuitive and efficient SAP Fiori apps faster and more cost-effectively. For businesses looking to modernize their SAP landscapes and improve user experience, SAP Fiori Elements is a cornerstone of any digital transformation strategy.