BTP ABAP Environment Setup – Free Tier

About

Legal entities (corporate) can register an account providing the corporate details and a valid debit/credit card information to SAP. As result you get an S-user assigned to your corporate email address. The card is not charged for the Free Tier offering. You can add more services and subscriptions for free until the free quota is reached. You can convert your services and subscriptions at the end of the probe period to a paid service plan, otherwise your BTP ABAP Environment is simply deleted.

You can try out many BTP services using the Free Tier in connection with ABAP, what You cannot do using the Trial offering, because you are not the owner of the trial system. The Free Tier account is especially useful to go beyond the basics of the ABAP Cloud certificate. There are many object types and variety of development scenarios which is not only about extensibility and clean core.

Trial and Free Tier are not the same. Trial offering can be registered by persons – without registering as a company – with simply a private email address. It means You can use your existing P-User or SAP Community account for that and kickstart with ABAP Cloud development.

Subaccount Setup

After the registration you get access to your corporates Global Account on BTP.

This is a high-level grouping of the subaccounts which contain the different runtime environments. In the old times everything had to be configured manually, but we have boosters to speed up the painful administration process nowadays. Let’s go for Free Tier.

The first step which needs your decision is the subaccount to place the new ABAP instance.

It is up to your development scenario. Placing instances in the same subaccount under other services and subscriptions can enlighten your life later user configurations and communication between services. Here strictly speaking about prototyping, not a productive scenario.

Leave entitlements on default values, and choose a fancy domain name which will be part of the subaccount and service instance URLs. Region is best nearest to You. Note: not all kind of services are available by all Providers and in all Regions. If you want to try out something specific later other than BTP ABAP Environment, then please check the service availability in SAP Discovery Center to make a good choice. Spaces are the further technical separation of subaccount services.

The booster saves you the effort for creating admin and developer users. Add your colleagues here. The result will be a basic setup. For additional services which are added to the subaccount on later time, further role collection assignments are needed.

In case the Subaccount name or the Subdomain is already used by others, the booster execution fails. Adjust the name to become unique and rerun the booster.

Time for break or starting doing something else. Setup time is several hours.

Although You can Navigate to Subaccount, but looking at the Instances You see creation and setup of the ABAP Container is still in progress. Wait patiently, this is the most time consuming part (hours).

Starting / Stopping the ABAP instance

Free Tier instances are not running 0-24. Manual start is required. Stopping manually before the automatic auto-shutdown is a polite action for our children !

The utility for that is the Landscape Portal.

If You do not find the Landscape Portal subscription in any of Your subaccounts, please subscribe.

Open Landscape Portal and start Manage System Hibernation.

Here You have the possibility to Start / Stop the system.

Logon

Fiori Launchpad (Dashboard)

This brings You to the Administration space after the initial setup.

ABAP Development Tools

To be able to connect using Eclipse / ADT You require Developer Authorizations and the endpoint to connect. This will unlock further tiles features related to development on the Fiori Launchpad (FLP).

First assign the developer PFCG role to your user in the FLP.

Save

Go back to the BTP Cockpit and create a new Service Key to the ABAP Instance.

Copy the URL from the Service Key

Create a new ABAP Cloud Project in ADT.

Enter the URL and Log on to BTP ABAP Environment with a user owning the Developer credentials above.

Working in local packages

You can already work in the local package ZLOCAL, it is automatically created upon system setup. You can back up objects from local packages using abapGit. You need an Eclipse plugin for that on BTP. Help Install New Software, then use this URL: https://eclipse.abapgit.org/updatesite/

List of Supported Object Types.

Setting up Software Components

This is an optional step, but here You have the possibility to understand how a Transport Request is integrated with git on BTP ABAP Environment to move objects across instances (system/clients), beside saving your work. This is how it works in production environments.
Git-Enabled Change and Transport System exists since 1909 onPremise as well.

Supported Object Types using Software Components.

The key here is that You can utilize git and the well known operations Clone/Pull/Commit/Push and a remote Git Repository to transfer Workbench Objects and Customizing Data. Although such operations are covered by the system internally. So as ABAPer not bothered by that .

Here You can see the official documentation about Software Components. We stick here to the bare minimum to record objects in Transport Requests (Commits) and back it up in your own GitHub repository assigned to the Software Component.

You can let SAP manage a remote git repository for your software component, which is visible in all subaccounts inside your global account. For that You need no additional git repository setup, SAP takes care of it internally. Originally SAP managed was the only option, then the possibility was provided to bring your own enterprise source code management systems.

Create a GitHub repository

New to git ? First register on github.com or other similar which is supported by SAP: GitLab, BitBucket, Azure or others.

Create a new repository, with readme.md and license files. These options will be provided during the creation wizard.

You also need a personal access token to write changes to the repository. If you have one, good, skip this.
Here are the steps to do that. Please apply below settings, it is a sample only but works with BAS as well , alter when needed to have a more strict policy. Keep your token at a safe place, it will be displayed once !

Create the Software Component

Launch the Manage Software Components application on the BTP ABAP Environment FLP.

Press Create.

Enter URL of your remote repository (GitHub forex) and choose the Type, which can be Development containing Workbench Objects or Business Configuration (Customizing).

Press Create then Clone the Repository.

Enter your Git User Name and the token previously created. Press Next.

Select the branch to be checked out (yours can be different). Press Next.

Select Repository Role as Source, due this is our Development System .

Clone finally.

Developing and Committing Objects in ADT

Let’s turn back to ADT.

The Transport Layer is automatically created, and varies by Software Component !

As you recognize, a package of type Structure is created. This means it can contain only subpackages and a package interface, but no development objects. For further modularization You need to create a subpackage of type Development.

Package encapsulated means that objects of this package can be accessed only through the package interface from other packages, and consumer packages define a dependency on that later on. So this is the same as onPremise.

Enter a Transport Request and Finish

If you turn back to the Software Components application on FLP, You will recognize your open Transport Request

Release Your Transport Task and Request on BTP ABAP Environment

Voila, the magic happens, your Objects are Committed and Pushed to GitHub !

In case your Free Tier ABAP instance expires, and you create a new BTP ABAP Environment instance after 3 months, you can Clone the Software Component holding Your objects into the new instance.

For Customizing data, you need to repeat the Software Component creation process with Type Business Configuration. You need another GitHub repository for that.

Real life scenarios can be different depending on development volume, modularization and nature of development (SaaS). Software components must be defined properly at the beginning, along with a good package hierarchy concept, release and dependency management strategy.