What you see is what you print (WYSIWYP)

Some decades ago, there have been a lot of thoughts concerning a paperless office and maybe the end of the printer.

The present looks quite different. Everybody needs (wants) a print button, to hardcopy the visible part of the browser.

From a UI5 framework perspective, everything is designed to be responsive in multiple devices, but what about print devices? Inside css, there is a special @media print directive, to control print/device specific output, but this does not offer an out-of-the-box print approach.

UI5 Print Demo

Now let us come to the interessting part...

SAP Fiori Client

User Interface libraries like OpenUI5 and SAPUI5 are part of the SAP UX (User Experience) strategy. SAP is delivering enterprise ready apps called SAP Fiori, where the underlying ui technology is UI5 and the dataservices are OData driven by the SAP Gateway. The SAP Fiori Client should give the user an anhanced ui experience.

SAP Fiori Client is a native application runtime for SAP Fiori on Android and iOS devices. The app acts as an enterprise enhancement to the mobile browser when SAP Fiori applications are running. It uses the same multi-channel SAP Fiori Web application, but users can enjoy more consistent performance thanks to the enhanced cache management features in the SAP Fiori Client. The application, a native mobile app built using the open source Apache Cordova framework, renders SAP Fiori application content, and provides more reliable asset caching (HTML, CSS, JavaScript files, and more) plus, on iOS, an enhanced attachment viewing process.

The needed native apps are freely available for iOS on the Apple Store and for Android on the Google play Store. In the near future, a client for Windows devices will also be available (see Feature Matrix).

SAP Fiori Client Feature Matrix

The Fiori Client supports the following feature set:

SAP Fiori Client Feature Matrix

Some of this features are part of the cordova plugin architecture and the other ones belong to the SAP Kapsel plugins. The Kapsel plugins are part of the SAP Mobile Platform (SMP).

Kapsel is a set of plugins for Apache Cordova which adds SMP capabilities to a Cordova application. The plugins provide a subset of the capabilities provided by the SMP Hybrid Web Container (HWC); this is only an initial release, so additional capabilities will come over to Kapsel over time.

Benefits for UI5 Developers

How can my custom UI5 app benefit from the freely available SAP Fiori Client?