The digital transformation journey in SAP landscapes increasingly revolves around delivering user-friendly, efficient, and real-time analytical applications. SAP Fiori Elements, Core Data Services (CDS) views, and OData services are foundational technologies that enable this seamless user experience.
While SAP HANA Live primarily offers real-time operational reporting through virtual data models on SAP HANA, integrating Fiori Elements with CDS views and OData services extends this capability by providing intuitive, SAP Fiori-based user interfaces. This article explores how these technologies interplay, enabling real-time, role-based, and scalable enterprise applications.
SAP Fiori Elements are a framework of predefined templates and UI components that accelerate the development of SAP Fiori applications. They use metadata-driven development, which means UI is generated automatically based on annotations in the backend data model, drastically reducing frontend coding effort.
CDS views are semantic data models defined on SAP HANA, providing reusable and extensible data definitions. In the SAP S/4HANA and SAP HANA Live context, CDS views often serve as the primary data source for reporting and analytical apps.
Open Data Protocol (OData) is a standard protocol to expose and consume data over RESTful APIs. CDS views can be published as OData services in SAP NetWeaver Gateway, making the data accessible to SAP Fiori frontends or any external clients.
Create CDS Views with UI Annotations
@UI.*) that describe how data fields should appear in the UI.Expose CDS Views as OData Services
Develop SAP Fiori Elements Applications
Deploy and Run
SAP HANA Live provides predefined calculation views with real-time operational data access on SAP HANA. However, these calculation views themselves do not natively support CDS-style annotations or OData exposure. To leverage Fiori Elements fully, many customers use:
This approach enables enterprises to maintain SAP HANA Live’s real-time performance while delivering rich SAP Fiori user experiences.
Integrating SAP Fiori Elements with CDS views and OData services is a powerful approach to transforming raw data from SAP HANA Live or SAP S/4HANA into engaging, real-time, and user-centric analytical applications. This integration not only accelerates application development but also ensures a consistent, scalable, and intuitive user experience aligned with SAP’s vision of the intelligent enterprise.
Organizations leveraging this integration unlock the true potential of their SAP data landscape, turning operational data into actionable insights through modern SAP Fiori apps.