RAP openSAP samples, five weeks of ABAP exercises that are no longer in sync

The repository tells you twice that it is out of date

The most important thing in this README is a caution notice, and it appears in the header before any description of the exercises.

The notice says the associated openSAP course, Building Apps with the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model, is no longer available, and that the exercises in the GitHub repository are not up to date. The same warning is repeated in the Requirements section, and it also points you to where current resources live: getting-started resources can be found on the SAP Community topic page for the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model, for example under the Learn and Develop section.

That framing matters for how you should read everything else in the repository. It is not a maintained tutorial with a broken link. It is the exercise code from a live course that ran from October 19, 2020 to December 1, 2020, left in place, with an explicit warning attached.

The description states the repository offers optional hands-on exercises for the free openSAP course. Optional is doing real work in that sentence, since a self-paced learner was never going to get through all of it, and the exercises were designed to be paired with the videos.

Five week folders mirror a course curriculum

The structure is a curriculum, one folder per week, and each folder has its own README with the exercises for that week.

Week 1 is the introduction to the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model. Week 2 is developing a read-only list report app, which is the classic first RAP scenario. Week 3 covers enabling the transactional behaviour of an app, which is where the RAP model departs from a plain read-only service. Week 4 is about dealing with existing code, and Week 5 covers service consumption and Web APIs.

That ordering tells you the shape of the model. RAP is presented as a progression from reading data, to writing it, to coexisting with code that predates it, to consuming services built elsewhere. The last two weeks are the ones that matter most to a working developer, and they are the ones a list of week folders hides.

The README also explains how the content was released. The information was made available in each section at the beginning of the relevant week during the live course period, so the repository was filled in progressively while people were watching. That is why the exercises exist as a set of week directories with READMEs rather than as a single tutorial document.

The videos were a requirement, and they are gone

The Requirements section is short and it is not about software. It asks you to watch the videos of the course available on the SAP learning platform, and it links to free access to SAP learning.

This is the structural weakness of the repository, and it is worth being blunt about. The exercises are not self-contained. The whole model is designed to be learned from a sequence of videos where the instructor builds the application step by step, and the exercise folders are the code for those steps. Without the videos, the code is a set of artefacts whose intent you have to reconstruct from the source.

What you can still do with the code is real, though. A finished list report implementation shows you the concrete objects and methods a RAP service exposes, and a transactional implementation shows you how the draft and action behaviour is wired up. Reading a working example of a pattern is a legitimate way to learn it, and the repository is a legitimate way to get one.

The practical approach is to use the repository as the example and the SAP Community topic page as the instruction. The README points at that page for getting-started resources, and the Learn and Develop anchor on that page is the closest thing to a maintained path through the same ground.

What is actually in the tree

The repository layout is minimal and tells you the shape of the project. At the root there are the README, a LICENSE file, a LICENSES/ directory, a REUSE.toml file, and the five week directories week1/ through week5/.

The REUSE.toml file and the REUSE status badge in the README header point at the REUSE software licensing approach, where each file carries its own licensing information so that a mixed-licence repository stays unambiguous. That is a meaningful detail for a corporate sample repository: it signals that the licensing is managed deliberately rather than assumed to be uniform, and the LICENSES/ directory holding the actual licence texts is where you would look for the exceptions.

The absence of a package manifest is also informative. There is no composer.json, no npm configuration, no build file of any kind, because these are ABAP source exercises meant to be pasted into a development system rather than built as a deployable artefact. Each week folder holds ABAP objects and a README describing what to do with them.

The repository has no GitHub releases, and the primary language is not detected as a specific one by the tooling, which is what you would expect from a directory of ABAP and some accompanying files.

Licensing is Apache 2.0 with per-file exceptions

The License section is the most precisely written part of the README, and it is the part a legal reader should not skip.

It states that copyright is held by SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company and the abap-platform-rap contributors, all rights reserved, and that the project is licensed under the Apache Software License version 2.0 except as noted otherwise in the LICENSE file in the LICENSES directory, and that you may not use any file of the project except in compliance with the License.

The phrase except as noted otherwise is the part that matters, and it is exactly what the REUSE.toml file and the LICENSES/ directory exist to support. In a repository like this, a sample may include a file under a different licence, and the Apache 2.0 grant does not automatically extend to it. The README also carries the standard disclaimer that the software is distributed on an AS IS BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, and points to the LICENSE for the language governing permissions and limitations.

The copyright year range in the notice runs to 2026, which is worth noting because the exercises themselves are from 2020. The licensing administration has been kept current even though the course content has not.

What to do instead, and what the repository is still good for

There is a clear path forward, and the README names it. Since the course is gone, the recommended starting point is the SAP Community topic page for the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model, where current getting-started resources live under Learn and Develop.

The other option is to work through the SAP learning platform directly, since the free access link is still in the Requirements section. Whether a particular course video is still available is not something the repository asserts, so you will have to check.

What the repository offers that a documentation page does not is a complete worked application. The week 2 list report is a starting point you can read end to end, and the week 3 transactional behaviour is the part of RAP that most developers find hardest to grasp from prose alone. Week 4 on existing code and week 5 on service consumption cover the two integration scenarios that a tutorial rarely bothers with.

Set expectations accordingly. Treat these folders as a code sample with a warning label, not as a curriculum. The exercise text was written to be followed alongside specific videos, and the SAP naming and object model it uses reflect what was current in late 2020, so anything you carry forward should be checked against the current RAP documentation and the release notes for your system.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this repository as a reference if you are learning the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model and want a concrete week by week example of what a RAP application looks like, since the folders walk from a read-only list report through to service consumption. Do not adopt it as a course you can follow from start to finish, because the README states in two places that the openSAP course is no longer available and that the exercises in the repository are not up to date. Before you work through any of it, check each week against the current RAP documentation and your system version, follow the pointer to the SAP Community topic page and its Learn and Develop section for current getting-started materials, and note the licensing terms, which are Apache 2.0 with the standard exceptions stated in the LICENSES directory.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: Apache-2.0
3. Project website
4. README
5. SAP-samples/abap-platform-rap-opensap on GitHub