What you need to know about SAP Fiori

If you are following SAP Mobile offerings you will clearly understand that SAP mobile offering has undergone numerous changes, and each release has its own style of identity with vast improvements and even the architecture itself changed.

I Started to SAP Mobile solutions from the age of SAP Mobile Engine, SAP Mobile Infrastructure, later with Sybase merge they have introduces SUP 2.x. Now again SAP played well with their latest SAP Mobile Platform 3 (SMP) offering. Later SAP released SAP Fiori in mid-2013, with this announcement initially I thought it’s another addition to their existing mobile platform SUP / SMP.

What is SAP Fiori?

SAP Fiori is light weight solution that work seamlessly with any HTML compatible device, it’s the first of its kind developed with SAP UI5. It runs on any device browser, in short it will have some html, js and css files associated with this.

Fiori is a solution which offers collection of SAP Mobile Apps, which were built using SAP UI5, these apps works mostly online and provide the simple User Interface. SAP has taken widely used common scenarios in their enterprise back end systems, like Sales order creation, Leave request approval flow into SAP Fiori apps, Since it’s light weight and online it mostly rely on OData protocol which will communicate with NW Gateway to connect with your backend systems. These apps can be called as Hybrid container apps, which run inside a container and provide the user rich user friendly experience.

READ ALSO: What’s changing in SAP Mobile Platform (SMP) 3.0

SAP Fiori Architecture

SAP Fiori, is easy to implement and integrate, we have just 3 components to connect.

The main core business logic remains in SAP as standard/ Custom ABAP Programs in your SAP Backend system, here our BAPI/RFC will play key role as the business logic remains still in SAP Side, from SAP we will send the data or receive the data and create/update the document at the back end. With SAP Pre-defined Fiori apps, it makes easier that you can simply plug in these into your current SAP Environment with minimal steps.

With SAP Fiori, there is an option you can create your own transactions as Fiori apps, for this you need to design the views, models and controllers to interact with your SAP System via NW Gateway. And you need to develop your own Business process logic in backend SAP System it it is not standard and just publish these web services to NW Gateway

Benefits with SAP Fiori

1. If you are looking for mostly online, and less complex workflow applications, Fiori might be a good choice to choose from various SAP Mobile platform offerings.
2. SAP Fiori runs as HTML5, so once you develop it will run on most of the available devices as a container apps.
3. Easy to implement compare with SAP Mobile platform.
4. SAP already provided lot of SAP Fiori apps, which you can implement right away into your current SAP Landscape.
5. SAP Fiori works with existing SAP roles in SAP Backend system.

Limitations with SAP Fiori

1. Fiori is based on HTML5, as we know HTML5 is still maturing, and little slow when compare with device native applications
2. Fiori apps may not work with device APIs, such as scan the material barcodes.
3. You cannot use Relay server capabilities with SAP Fiori.