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Oct 23, 2021 at 01:37 PM

Issues loading Guided Fiori Development in Business Application Stuidio

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Hi,

We are trying to use Guided Fiori Development in the Business Application studio and are having some issues. Hoping for input and guidance on the following:

A) What are the requirements for the guided development loading properly. We have deducted the following from blogs, other threads on this forum etc., but it does not seem to be complete:

  1. the CAP project must have a devDependency to "@sap/ux-specification" in the package.json.
  2. the app must be listed in the "sapux" of the package.json.
  3. the app must have a service in its manifest.json which has the same path as the the target data service will be mounted on.

B) Some patterns in CDS files seem to disrupt the Guided Development when loading. When this happens we see no error messages or warnings, there is just no data in the list of available Guides. It is difficult to trace root causes without the error messages, but some patterns which seem to trigger this are:

  1. Declaring compounded types inside the Service definitions (e.g. to build return structures for bound functions). Simple types seem to work fine, but nesting them and/or referring to aspects or types of other CDS files breaks it. Moving the type definitions outside the service helps as a workaround.
  2. If the sequence of "using" statements in the CDS files obscures references between the files depending on which file the CDS parsing starts in (cds build / cds deploy still works).

C) The plugins involved in processing the CAP project structure are surging the CPU of the development environment. In a small "hello world" type of project this is barely noticeable (the state remains for a couple of seconds) but in a realistic sized development project it sometimes drains the system for minutes or even crashes it (I have to restart the Business Application Studio). I am not sure this is the Guided Development plugin or some other plugin, I can only see that the thread spiking is "/usr/local/bin/node /theia/node_modules/@theia/plugin-ext/lib/hosted/node/plugin-host.js"

Hoping the above description is clear and that we can get some help on it. The combination of B) and C) is troublesome in particular - the guides suddenly disappear without feedback as to why and the trial-and-error exercise to trace it out involves changing something, waiting for a minute for the CPU surge to pass and the restarting the Guided development environment to see if it helped. This can take several hours in tricky scenarios.

Thanks in advance

//Carl