Easy & quick frontend applications with SAP Fiori Elements

April 7, 2025

4 minutes

If you are an SAP backend developer or a technical team lead and you are looking for better ways to generate frontend applications, SAP Fiori Elements is here for you.

As a low-code solution, SAP Fiori Elements offers a quick and budget-friendly way to generate a frontend, thereby allowing backend developers to create full stack applications. Here is what you should know and how you can get started.

What is SAP Fiori Elements?

SAP Fiori Elements is a framework built by SAP designed to streamline and simplify Fiori app development. It delivers a set of predefined templates for the most used floorplans.

The framework uses annotations to shape and design the app, removing the need for UI5 developments skills such as JavaScript and HTML coding. This makes it very attractive for ABAP developers to start building full-stack enterprise-grade Fiori applications.

Why choose Fiori Elements?

Fiori Elements allows you to generate crisp frontend applications. But how does it compare with other low-code platforms that make the same promise? What makes Fiori Elements the best choice?

Coverage. Fiori Elements covers most application scenarios, making it a tool that will simplify the lives of developers every day.
UX consistency. With Fiori Elements, the newly created applications are automatically consistent with the Fiori design guidelines. Keeping that consistency through other frameworks may be much more challenging and costly.
Always up to date. Since SAP maintains the framework and updates it automatically, the apps are guaranteed future-proof.
Extensible. In case you absolutely need features that are not covered by Fiori Elements, it is possible to extend the application with custom code.

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Which applications are covered by Fiori Elements?

Perhaps the biggest advantage of Fiori Elements is that it can cover most new application scenarios. So once you get started, you’re bound to use it regularly. The different floorplans are: List reports, Object pages, Worklists, Overview pages and Analytical list pages.

The most popular type of app is the List report and Object page, or LROP for short. This application template is used to view, edit and delete business objects – a CRUD application. This is one of the central apps that Fiori Elements is able to generate on the fly.

Another versatile and impressive-looking app type is the overview page: a data-driven app that gives users all the information they need to see on a single page. Its content is typically based on users’ specific domains or roles, and it’s a great way to collect data from various sources and display everything side by side without needing to switch screens. On such overview pages, the tasks or topics – tests, charts, lists, tables – are displayed efficiently with cards.

How to get started & how to start building an application?

Fiori Elements can be built on any OData API, it will most commonly be found in combination with a RAP service (Restful ABAP Programming).

RAP is the latest technology for building OData APIs on top of your system. It utilizes Core Data Services (CDS) for data modeling and RAP Business Objects to define the application's behavior. Finally, annotations are added to the data model to shape the app.

Eclipse IDE is the newest expansion of the ABAP Developer toolkit. The ABAP Development Toolkit (ADT) turns this widely adopted IDE into a robust environment that supports the latest ABAP development standards and methodologies.

Changing and extending your project

There are 2 new ways to extend Fiori applications, both standard SAP and custom build, if they are built using the Fiori Elements framework: “Key User Extensibility” and the “Flexible Programming Model”.

While the Flexible Programming Model caters to developers needing extensive customization capabilities, Key User Extensibility empowers business users to make necessary adjustments without requiring in-depth technical skills.

Fiori Elements: the developer’s workhorse

Fiori Elements offers an excellent way to build applications. For a backend developer, it allows the creation of attractive-looking SAP Fiori frontend applications without having to call in another developer.

Fiori Elements cannot cover all scenarios, but it can cover surprisingly many. Especially for the visualisation of reports or dashboards that contain different types of information, the Fiori Elements technology is an excellent workhorse.