Quick Start with the Mobile Development Kit (MDK)

This step includes creating the mobile development kit project in the editor.

1. Launch the Dev space in SAP Business Application Studio.

2. Click Start from template on Welcome page.

   

   If you do not see Welcome page, you can access it via Help menu.

3. Select MDK Project and click Start.

   

4. In Basic Information step, provide the below information and click Next:

   Field	Value
   MDK template type	Select CRUD from the dropdown
   Your project name	MDKApp
   Your application name	<default name is same as project name, you can provide any name of your choice>

   

   If you see Cloud foundry token expired, continue without mobile services connection? message, then set up the Cloud Foundry environment again by clicking at bottom left corner of your status bar to initiate a valid session and click Start Over.

5. In Service Configuration step, provide or select the below information and click Next:

   Field	Value
   Service File Name	<Provide any name of your choice>
   OData Source	Select Mobile Services from the dropdown
   Application Id	Select com.sap.mdk.demo from the dropdown
   Destination	Select SampleServiceV2 from the dropdown
   Enter a path to the OData service	Leave it as it is
   Language URL	Leave it with the default value
   Enable Offline	It’s enabled by default

   

   In this tutorial, server-side configuration for this MDK app were already done.

   Regardless of whether you are creating an online or offline application, this step is needed for app to connect to an OData service. When building an MDK Mobile application, it assumes the OData service created and the destination that points to this service is set up in Mobile Services. For MDK Web application, destination is set up in SAP BTP cockpit.

   The generated application will be offline enabled in the MDK Mobile client and will run as online in Web environment.

6. In OData Collections step, select Customers, Products, SalesOrderHeaders and SalesOrderItems. Click Finish to complete the project creation.

   

7. After clicking Finish, the wizard will generate your MDK Application based on your selections. You should now see the MDKApp project in the project explorer. As you have already opened the workspace, there is no need to open the generated project in a new workspace. Ignore the pop-up or click the cross icon to hide the window.

   

This is how the project structure looks like within the workspace.

These are the metadata definitions available in the editor and the format in which these metadata definitions are stored in the editor. Just to brief on some of these:

• InitializeOffline.action: For Mobile applications, this action binds the application to the Mobile Services Offline OData server and downloads the required data to the offline store on the mobile device. For Web applications, it will initialize the service to be consumed in online mode.

• DownloadOffline.action and UploadOffline.action: These actions are applicable to Mobile client only. Using app initialization, data is downloaded to the offline store. If you want to have the application download any updated data from the backend server or upload changed data to the backend server, these actions will be needed.

• Success & Failure Message action: Here are some messages showing up in the app on a successful or failure of data initialization, sync etc.

• Main.page: This is the first page of your MDK application that is shown. For this application you will use this as a launching page to get to application functionality.

• OnWillUpdate.js: This rule is applicable to Mobile client only. MDK applications automatically download updates and apply them to the client without the end-user needing to take any action. The OnWillUpdate rule empowers the user to run business logic before the new definitions are applied. This allows the app designer to include logic to prompt the user to accept or defer applying the new definitions based on their current activity. For example, if the end-user is currently adding new customer details or in the middle of a transaction, they will be able to defer the update. The app will prompt again the next time it checks for updates.

• Application.app: this is the main configuration file for your application from within SAP Business Application Studio. Here you define your start page (here in this tutorial, it is main.page), action settings for different stages of the application session lifecycle, push notifications, and more.

Open the application settings in the application editor by double clicking on the Application.app.

So far, you have learned how to build an MDK application in the SAP Business Application Studio editor. Now, you will deploy this application definition to Mobile Services and Cloud Foundry to consume it as Mobile and Web application respectively.

1. Right-click Application.app and select MDK: Deploy.

   

2. Select deploy target as Mobile & Cloud.

MDK editor will deploy the metadata to Mobile Services (for Mobile application) followed by to Cloud Foundry (for Web application).

First web deployment takes 2-3 minutes as it creates five service instances for the application, you can find these details in space cockpit.

• XSUAA

• destination

• connectivity

• HTML Repo host

• HTML repo runtime

You should see successful messages for both deployments.

SAP Business Application Studio has a feature to generate QR code for onboarding the mobile app.

Double-click the Application.app to open it in MDK Application Editor and click Application QR Code icon to populate the QR code.