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In-app extensibility focuses on adaptations cre-
ated by key users, with its main features geared
toward adding new elds or custom logic and
adapting the standard UIs. Custom forms,
reports and UIs, and custom business objects are
also supported. Discovery of in-app extensibility
capabilities is possible through the extensibility
cockpit – a key-user app that allows developers
to browse through data and process models and
visualize extensibility options.
In contrast to in-app extensibility, side-by-side
extensibility on SAP Cloud Platform allows devel-
opers to build their own applications, enhancing
and supplementing SAP S/4HANA and SAP
S/4HANA Cloud. As shown earlier in Figure 1,
although the coupling of side-by-side extensions
is quite loose, tight integration on all architecture
layers is still provided by the appropriate APIs.
So, side-by-side extensibility is mainly a story of
APIs and suitable programming models. All
APIs available for side-by-side extensibility are
documented on SAPAPIBusinessHub. The
programming model (use of SAP Cloud Platform
software development kit) is explained in 3.1.2.
Both in-app and side-by-side extensibility depend
on the stability of the supporting APIs and data
models. Therefore, SAP introduced a release, or
whitelisting, concept to ensure the stability of
these objects dependent upon the usage contract.
In SAP S/4HANA Cloud, only released APIs are
accessible. This applies to both in-app and side-
by-side extensibility. To ensure the system’s
integrity, especially during upgrades, and to
decrease operation cost and incidents, compli-
ance with the release concept is enforced for
all extensions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. In
on-premise environments with SAP S/4HANA,
the use of released APIs is not mandatory but
recommended, so you can smoothly bring your
custom code toward cloud stability, step-by-step.
In addition to the release concept, a deprecation
concept for APIs exists. APIs that must be depre-
cated for any reason (for example, a new API
with a more complete feature set is available)
are marked as being deprecated, and a substi-
tute API is documented. In any case, APIs will be
available for a long period of time before being
deprecated, and they can still be actively used for
two to three releases before they are withdrawn.
Extensibility must cover a broad spectrum of
adaptation, and in times of quickly changing
business processes, extensibility projects need
to be fast and ecient.
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