The Extensibility Framework is an SDK for Android applications, providing to
developers the ability to add or replace screens or subviews, change navigation patters,
update the data model, add custom actions, and so on. You can use it when developing new
applications, but you can also extend existing applications with little effort; you need not
recompile and redistribute the apps.
The main features of the Extensibility Framework include:
- Declarative structural extensibility – define the UI layout, navigation patterns, data bindings, event handling,
context passing, value formatting, undo behavior, and so on via
configuration.
- Adaptive data management – the framework is independent of the data model, because the data is
abstracted. It provides a ready-to-use datasource adapter, which manages
conversions between OData and the generic data format, but you can also
implement custom data source adapters for other data formats.
- Integrated OData facade – The SDMDataSource library is a wrapper that you can use on top of the SAP
Mobile Platform Connectivity and OData management libraries. A set of simple
APIs replace the usual coding required to manage network requests, parse and
cache OData feeds, and to perform additional tasks that are related to
online and offline OData handling.
- Extension Points – the framework exposes a set of protocols and delegates, so you can replace
or decorate the default behavior based on your project’s needs. For example,
you can implement delegates to create a view or a custom control, fix data
validation issues, intercept actions fired by controls, modify the look and
feel of UI elements, and so on. You can take over the full creation
mechanism of the elements, but it is also possible to only decorate the
elements created by the framework.
- Support for localizable demo data – the framework provides support for localized demo data, which allows apps to
start in offline mode, lets customers look at an app without requiring a
connection.
- Skinnable UI elements (via MAF Reusable Components) – Mobile Application Framework (MAF) includes reusable components that fulfill
the product standards of globalization, usability, and accessibility.
- Value, currency, date, time, and address formatting (via MAF Reusable
Components) – define the data to be formatted in the configuration XML to format and
localize them based on different criteria, such as the device locale, the
country code, or international prefixes for phone numbers.
- Advanced logging and error handling – the framework includes meaningful log messages that precisely indicate the
root cause of any problems, for example, by identifying any inappropriate
values or parameters in the layout configuration XML file.