# Flexible ABAP - SAP Development in JetBrains

Flexible ABAP brings ABAP, CDS views and RAP behavior definitions to JetBrains IDEs, with a grammar we rebuilt from scratch and real SAP system connections.


This one took a while: Flexible ABAP.
ABAP is one of those languages where you are basically stuck with whatever tooling SAP hands you. If you’ve spent time in Eclipse with ADT, you know exactly what I mean.
The hard part was that neither the language spec nor a usable existing implementation is publicly available. So we recreated the grammar from scratch. All of it - ABAP, CDS views, and RAP behavior definitions.
What you get out of that: context-aware completion for 200+ keywords, CDS annotation completion (@UI, @ObjectModel, @Semantics, @Analytics), RAP actions, validations and determinations, hover docs that link straight into SAP Help. Plus 70+ live templates and 25 postfix templates. Type lt_items.loop and get the whole LOOP AT ... ASSIGNING FIELD-SYMBOL block. Small things, but they add up over a day.
It connects to real systems too. ADT over REST on modern ones, browser-based IDP login for BTP Cloud (paste your service key and it fills the rest in), and - the part I really did not expect to build - plain RFC over SOAP for old NetWeaver 7.0 systems that predate ADT entirely.
Debugging works fully in the IDE on ADT systems: breakpoints, stepping, variables. On the ancient ones you set breakpoints in the IDE and step through in SAP GUI. Not elegant. It works.
Big thanks to Q for testing the whole thing on SAP_BASIS 700 and sending back a corrected installer.
Since we built the language layer from nothing, feedback matters more here than on anything else we’ve done. Break it and tell us how.
Get it here: plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/30488-flexible-abap